About Bill’s Books

Most of Fleming’s imagery in the show began life on this bookshelf in his home office. For most of his life, Bill’s oeuvre has consisted primarily of quick scribblings on little scraps of paper – ideas, arrangements, concepts and sometimes just mindless doodles. He always preferred these random, spontaneous elements of his creative process to the highly polished final executions he made for his commercial clients. “Seems like I spent my whole graphic design career trying to get my “finished work” to look and feel as alive and fresh as those first loose thumbnail drawings did,” Fleming confesses.

In May of 2001, Fleming and Turnbull went to Paris together to celebrate Susan’s “special” birthday and spent 10 days walking all over the city, learning art history the fun way. On their return they both found themselves inspired beyond all expectation and began producing their personal fine art portfolios in earnest.

It was at this time that Fleming’s random sketches began to migrate onto pages in “those intimidating, fancy little drawing journals that we’re all afraid to mess up” and took on a sort of process quality – drawings done in series whereby each volume takes on its own distinct character. (Think ‘visual novels’ following deKooning’s suggestion to ‘kill the canvas.’).

To date Bill has filled around 35 such volumes and in the process, evolved a distinctive graphic vocabulary – a sort of open-ended, perhaps even cryptic, visual language.

The show features a 16 of Bill’s volumes in their entirety, as well as selected book pages that have been photographed, enlarged and printed as freestanding, framed, digital artist’s proofs.

In addition, just for this event, one of the books was photographed front to back by Bill’s daughter Bonny Fleming, then made into a digital presentation shown on an iPad pro (special framing props to Chance at Perfect Hanging Gallery.)

Next steps for the books may be to explore the possibility of publishing them somehow, but for now, Fleming is just happy to get a few of them off the shelf, into the hands, and in front of the eyeballs of others who may find them an interesting way to spend a little time.

p.s. Bill says, “See all those markers sticking out of the books? Those were put there by Susan and Denise (Dubroy, Dahl curator), bless their hearts. They went through 27 of my books page by page, marking which ones they felt might work as freestanding pieces in the show. We didn’t print them all, of course, but we printed quite a few. Come take a look!”