A teller of tall tales, a creator of humorous fantasies, a moralist who trumpets cautionary lessons about tolerance, an artist who fervently believes that craftsmanship is essential to meanigful creativity and a man who loves nature with a gentle passion: These are just some of the elements that make up the complex giftedness of Frank Fleming.
Fleming draws upon his childhood and upbringing to create a world of wonderful creatures. He gives flights of fancy to vegetable images (labeled here as vegitables) and takes the forms of flowers and plants into realms of permanent elegance.
Raised in rural Alabama, he developed a deep kinship with wild creatures and a refined eye for forms in nature. The easy combination of animal and human elements comes not from antiquity and ploytheistic beliefs but from observations that reveal the kinship between animal and human behavior. This combined with an incisively whimsical sense of humor, produces works that appeal to everyone fascinated with things of this world.
Vintage Fleming, his stack of seven turtles called "Slow Social Climbers" presents a pyramid of successively smaller turtles, one on top of another, until the top little turtle is found sitting on a lily pad over the other six. This is artfully inoffensive social commentary cunningly devised and easily understood.
All of Fleming's works are readily accessible at the congnitive level: A lily looks like a lily; a frog looks like a frog; a turtle is definitely a turtle. Whether he combines a goat head and feet with a human male body or places a catfish head on the body of a fisherman, Fleming touches on dichotomies that excite our imagination and we move from recognition into a realm of fantasy.
Frank Fleming's sculptures become provocative friends with which we share a common bond found in all nature, an easy interdependence that establishes a new awarenss about ourselves.
(James R. Nelson is visual arts critic for the Birmingham.......Birmingham News November 1999)
Another Link to My Work at http://www.dart.fine-art.com
