Fun with Fairy Tales

“Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” -G.K. Chesterton

I was excited that we started talking about G.K. Chesterton because this is one of my favorite quotes and it goes with talking about fairy tales. I really liked the looking at the Gospel as a fairy tale the most out of fairy tale, tragedy, and comedy mainly because I love stories and fairy tales have just enough sadness and happiness in them (much like the clips we watched in class).

Class on Tuesday it seemed like the majority of what we talked about was how all stories have a deeper meaning, and as storytellers we need to embrace this, but I just don’t believe that because as artist aren’t we supposed to questions things? This all made me think of a painting I had done because (at my high school the seniors in art got to paint a ceiling tile). I painted it because this image has meaning to me and if anyone else looks at it they can interpret it how they want (and that's exactly what I want, for people to see different things in it, it doesn’t really have a designated meaning or “extra level."

How do you tell when you’re “understanding the extra level” turns into symbol spotting and over analyzing? And how do you know what the author was actually intending if anything?