Happy Birthday Frank Fleming born in Alabama on June 17th 1940.
Frank Fleming was born on a farm in Alabama in 1940. He was one of four children raised on the small family farm. Like many families in rural Alabama, the Flemings lived in impoverished circumstances, and Fleming has noted that his family did not have indoor plumbing or electricity throughout his childhood.
He suffered from a severe speech impediment, which caused him to stop talking in school in the first grade and did not speak until he was about eight years old.
More comfortable in the outdoors, and because words often failed him, he came to express himself in art and nature. According to Fleming, each of his art pieces “takes on its own being – it seems to have a soul”. That’s a reminder, he says, of nature’s importance in our lives.
Fleming graduated college and took a job with military contractor Hayes Aircraft Corporation in Birmingham, where he worked as a technical illustrator. During the next six years, Fleming worked in the drafting department producing engineering drawings related to the Saturn V rocket program.
His love of art surfaced and went into professional mode when he completed his master’s in fine arts (MFA) and sold his first works and taught art before opening his studio and pursuing art full time.
Fleming is known for his bronze and porcelain pieces, which combine a sense of reality and awareness along with whimsy. His works are seen in museums and collections all over the world.
“Recreating these fantasy figures [is] . . . basically a form of self-communication. There’s just no way I can shut down my fantasies, and the work relieves me of some of the pressures.” Artist quoted in American Artist, April 1979
