The painstaking work begins with cutting fabrics that she collects from friends, fabric stores, yard sales and antique shops. Once the fabric has been applied to the canvas she begins painting on it, usually with oils.

The look, as you can see, is striking, haunting, sometimes whimsical and always unique. Human faces seem to spring gently from a background of Ivy like flowers on the vine, and feet grow into the earth like roots. Sometimes the effect is eerie as if a form is being overtaken by the growing things around it, returning it to the earth-as all living things inevitably return.

The medium is only part of the story, of course. In her paintings, the images themselves, set against a mountain or filed or park hilltop, simultaneously underscore the otherness of the human animal and it’s connectedness to all other living things. Within the world of her paintings, which so strongly emphasize the natural world, these are odd creatures, tenderly-sometimes sadly engaged in the act of living, rooted to the growing and decaying matter beneath their bare feet.

The result is pictures that tell a compelling story as familiar to us as our own heartbeat, so familiar it seems almost unnecessary to put it into words. It’s the story of living and dying and living and dying and all the comedy and tragedy that entails. All human beings are born with theis story; it’s the one we carry around inside us, the miracle of which we are inclined to forget.

That’s the subtle comfort of Fleck’s paintings and the source of their humor. In some instances, that’s the challenge of the paintings, the tension between the grim and the glorious-the paradox of being alive.

Elaine Fleck lives in Roanoke, VA., with her husband, Richard, and son, Tai. She is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University and City College of San Francisco.