I continue with my illustrations for Flash Fiction February 2020, twenty-nine days of flash fiction stories at Fictive Dream,  an online fiction magazine featuring short stories.

For the event I created a small abstract painting for each selection – in fact, I did more than one painting per story. I am showing you all the images, day by day, throughout February. I’m also including a short write-up as to how I went about turning the authors’ words into pictorial representations.

I hope you’ll take a look at my art, then go to Fictive Dream, see which image editor Laura Black chose for the magazine, and read the story!

Thank you to Laura for her faith in my work and to the authors for such wonderful material to work with.

Today’s story is:

The Baker’s Dream by George Wallace. Read it here at Fictive Dream.

Here are the artworks on their own:

and here they are with the banner.

Comments:

This is a story of faith and human frailties. It concerns a baker, a loaf of bread, the face of Jesus, a miracle healing, and the implications of the collision among all these elements. Faces were a motif throughout the story, so I included them in my images, as well as the baker and the loaf of bread.

Image 57 – I focused on the moment when the baker confronts his faith, or lack of: “Why would you do a terrible thing like this to me? he asked the loaf of bread, holding it up to the lamplight and examining it sadly”, as the text says. I included the dark night sky outside the bakery, with its infinity of the unknown as a backdrop for the subdued atmosphere of the interior of the bakery.

Image 58 – I used similar colors to Image 57 to depict night and coldness. In this picture, the baker and the loaf wait together inside while the townspeople crowd outside in the dark and snow with an air of confrontation about them.

Read the story at Fictive Dream.