Life gets weird

Yesterday I went to an artists' brunch. I had no idea wht to expect. By the end of three hours there were about 20 of us there. It turns out that there were three traveling artists. They were film makers and had had a formal film presentation the night before. It is their custom to host a brunch following their presentations. This is supposed to be almost a "show'n'tell" event with other local artists bringing their work to display and discuss. Each participant is expected to comment and discuss the work presented, and then to write more private opinions down to give to the presenting artist to read and consider later. There was quite a variety of art forms represented in the group. The first presented had a delightful short ( 2-3 minutes) film, but the second artist described herself as being "into burlesque" and discussed how she makes her costumes, mainly by hand. She brought her sewing box and showed us her sequins etc. Others were film makers and print makers, and even a lady doing hand embroidery. The discussions were marvellous.

This is one of the reasons I had originally joined this group--to have the oportunity to dialogue and learn from other artists. They pointed out to me that while I use a lot of symbolism in my work to convey a message, my work doesn't provide the viewer any opportunity to respond, nor does it necessaruily evoke any thought processes inthe viewer--there is no capacity for dialogue. Part of this is that my work is so very obvious and "out there". It doesn't appear to have any layers, or hidden parts. This came out during a discussion around why there is so much in the way of degraded or ambiguous imagery, and/or layering, in current art. Food for thought, but I'm not sure how this may or may not influence what I do.
Part of this might be a need to produce saleable art. The darker stuff needs to be kept, and/or used for other purposes. I don't produce a lot of dark stuff