Skylight: Where are you?

I have a friend who told me that when she saw this painting she imagined that she was sitting in a food hall surrounded by friends. The image, to her, was from the perspective of someone who has food and beer and good company. Someone leaning back and looking up happily at the sky through the skylight.

Marcel Duchamp said "a work of art only exists when the spectator has looked at it"^[1], for me this is exactly what he meant. Skylight has one more meaning now, and in many ways it is more important than any meaning I could impart on it. Invariably, many more meanings will be generated as more people see the image. This is true of all images.

This is one of the many things that interests me about art in general, and about producing my own art in particular. Each image I make can have a plurality of meanings to any number of people. Even if the meanings contradict, they are all the meaning. They all exist. If you like, you could imagine a kind of average 'meaning' for a particular image that found the center of these meanings. Like averages elsewhere, it may be useful or useless to do this depending on the circumstances.

This experience has added to my internal meaning of this painting, and it has changed how I see it. Before, there was a skylight and roof beams and a sense of nearby sunlight. Now there is also hope.