He turned and pointed to the painting and said something like: “The orange line means there’s an orange line. The yellow line means there’s a yellow line, and the blue background means there’s a blue background.”

I understand his response to this question about what art means.

Because to ask an artist to explain the meaning of their artwork is to fundamentally misunderstand the artist.

Sure, some artists can and want to explain the meaning of their work, but for others, defining its meaning is not the “reason” one makes art.

After all, meaning comes not simply from one piece but from a body of work. If you look at the full spectrum of an artist’s output, you’ll see a through line, a struggle that persists and threads through everything.

Often—too often—artists and writers are asked: What is your book ABOUT? What is your painting SAYING? What does your dance MEAN?

This question fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the creative act, imagination, and wonder. Demanding someone tell you what to think of a piece of art is like going to therapy and ordering the therapist to make sense of your life in one session.

It doesn’t matter what the artist meant. Often, the artist doesn’t know, which is why they spent four years making it. Life is a question that art tries to answer, which is why demanding answers from a single work of art is a short-term game played in a (hopefully) long-term life.

When you look at an entire or growing body of work, you can begin to identify the questions and themes that perpetuate throughout on your own. You may discover that what drives you is the question, not the answers.

A better and more fruitful way to ask what something means is to flip the question around and put it back on yourself. It’s my belief that at the core of every person lies a question, and life takes its shape from the conscious or subconscious pursuit of answering or avoiding that question.

If you look at your life with the objectivity of viewing an artist’s body of work, what themes do you see? What recurs? What is your constant struggle? What are your patterns? What do you run from? What do you fear?

What is the question your life is trying to answer?