…is the name of today’s story on Fictive Dream.
Throughout the month of February 2021 I will be showing you illustrations I did for Flash Fiction February 2021 at Fictive Dream, an online short-story magazine. For more information about FFF21 and my artwork process, look here.
Here’s the image editor Laura Black chose for this story, The Stuff of Dreams, by Jo-Anne Cappeluti.
And here is the artwork with the banner. Take a look at this image. And then…
Read the story at Fictive Dream.
Claudia McGill and Her Art World 
these remind me of more abstracts than your abstracts
If you think of there being a continuum of art, representational at one end, totally abstract at the other, these fall closer to the abstract end, that is very true. And it is what I was aiming for in this project – that there would be nothing representational at all, so that the story would provide that aspect of the art’s interpretation.
So otherworldly Claudia. Fantastic.
Thank you. I like how this piece turned out. I got into doing stenciling via some of my clay work, last year, and I like the hard edged effect a stencil provides (when I say stencil, I am cutting out circles in paper, settting it on the background, painting it in, and voila! circles! I don’t like to use stencils I have not cut myself, and I have done a lot with people. But. I drift off my point. I meant to say, I liked the effect of the hard-edged circles sort of flying or floating on the more vague background a lot.
I love the colours and the rounded forms in this piece. It makes me think of seeing pebbles in the bed of a shallow stream – what I would call a burn.
I love that image. I recall the same sight in my childhood – we had a small creek running alongside our yard and the colors of the stones in the water – I don’t know if it was childhood memory amplifying my vision or it was true, but those stones glowed.
The Stuff of Dreams by Jo-Anne Cappeluti is quite an introspective story about ambitions and dreams both realised and thwarted. I love the chosen image because it has a dream-like quality with its beautiful, floaty circles both large and small. Matthew (above) describes it as otherwordly and that is about right. I love the palette also – the green and different purples works so well against the beige. Thank you, Claudia, a lovely illustration.
Thank you. I have been making art using stencils (in this case circles cut out of paper) and I liked placing them against the vaguer background. There is a balance to putting shapes into an image like this and I remember taking a good bit of time to move slowly through the painting (because once you paint in the circle, well, you have a circle for good). I loved this story. The sense of there being one person, yes, but in layers, moving through time and yet all together at once. Paradoxical and yet exactly how things are. A very poignant story, I thought.
I really like the interplay between solid and pattern in your painting. And of course your color combinations are always wonderful! (K)
Thank you. I find that using a stencil technique seems to make making layers happen easily. It’s sort of like collage in how it seems to work for me.