Seed

Artwork from the story

Steve Fendt
5 min readNov 11, 2022

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My serial fiction story Seed about the Melbourne art world is up now on Medium for a beta read. I thought it might be fun to do a separate picture story with just the artworks I created for each of the twelve chapters.

So here goes:

Photo of a narrow Melbourne laneway altered to look like a pencil sketch.
‘Claustrophobic’ — from Chapter 1: ‘Return to the City’

One of Melbourne’s many narrow, cobbled laneways. Very Dickensian!

Nocturnal photo of the roof of the Supreme Court building in Melbourne from high above, altered to look like a painting.
‘Perspectival’ — from Chapter 2: ‘Mouth Meet Foot’

This is the back of the Supreme Court shot from the eighth floor of the Mantra on Little Bourke. I loved the powerful lighting and vertiginous perspective.

Photo of Hardware Lane in Melbourne with few pedestrians, from a low viewpoint and a central vanishing point. Strong horizontal and vertical lines.
‘Hardware Lane’ — from Chapter 3: ‘Noodle Soup’

Again a narrow laneway, but more life this time — and the Pho café which features in the story.

Melbourne CBD façades with palm tree and fire escape in foreground, in trippy unnatural colours over a swirling orange/red motif.
‘Trippy City’ — from Chapter 4: ‘The Factory’

Taken from the centre courtyard of Gordon House. I loved the mixture of old and modern façades with the palm tree — and applying this Pop Art filter, like, blew my mind, man …

Here’s the original photo for comparison:

Photo of Melbourne façades: original photo for the previous image.
Old and modern walls and fire escape, from Gordon House

Which is pretty cool itself, I think.

Pencil drawing of naked young woman with long black hair, seated on the ground, one leg raised. The original has been split into magenta, yellow, cyan and black colour separations in a row.
‘CMYK’ — from Chapter 5: ‘Flatmates’

This old lifedrawing of mine from the mid-1990s came in handy as it sort-of matches the subject matter of the chapter. I decided it needed tricking up a bit with the colour separations.

The Victorian-era Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton Gardens, Melbourne, with ornate fountain in the foreground and isolated pedestrians strolling on a sunny morning.
‘Royal Exhibition Building’ — from Chapter 6: ‘Heartbeat’

The already stunning photo I was lucky to capture, of the backlit fountain in the early morning light, in front of the shaded façade with its majestic dome, really reached…

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Steve Fendt

https://stevefendt.substack.com Short stories, serial fiction, memoirs of a possibly quasi-true nature. Stories of the Australian beach and bush.