It's so memorable, probably why it stick in my memory: how can you have a canvas without a wall? The wall is the canvas. Yet the wall simultaneously constrains the canvas, thus allowing it to become the canvas, to become worthy of a canvas. This French idiom says so much without saying practically anything.
Even more evidence of how versatile that French phrase is. There's just so many acceptable meanings to it, and every one of them points to the same conclusion: bounds enable art.
