Layered marks and memories form “Ghost,” left, and “Ella Venus” in Jeff Fleming’s new series of drawings based on family photos. (Photos: Moberg Gallery) By Wren Fleming Seeing pictures of your parents as children can be alarming. You used to look like that? You used to be an ornery little cuss with sideways-darting eyes? That’s not who I know. What you may not know is that every rendering in “Ghosts,” an exhibition that opens Friday at Moberg Gallery, is based on a very real photograph, some of them no bigger than the palm of my hand. They’re a collection of chalkboard drawings, executed in painstaking detail by Jeff Fleming, the former director of the Des Moines Art Center. Also my dad. Indeed, a lot of details reveal themselves when I discuss childhood with my parents. They each had different upbringings than the one they created for my sister and me, which we agree was an exceptionally fortunate and individual experience. We’re all quite close, and I’d like to think that we tell each other everything. But my dad and I are the same in this: We keep things to ourselves. The people rendered in his drawings are people in our family, my bloodline. But they are ghosts to me as much as they are to you. Dad’s brother Mike passed from this life before I was born. The only things I know about him are what other people have mentioned over the years, which may or may not add up to an authentic portrayal. So in Dad’s drawing of him, it seems fitting that he’s covered with a white bedsheet, like a ghost costume, his eyes cutting through like razors. It’s like he’s challenging us: I bet you can’t guess who I am. Dad’s brother Steve lives in North Carolina. I see him once a year, if that. In his portrait, I’m both pleasantly surprised and enamored to see him not as a grown-up doctor but as a little boy playing with cowboys at Christmas, holding on for dear life to the family’s beloved dog Topper. While the boys in the show are mostly cavorting with toys or flying kites, the women are more mysterious. They’re fashionable Southern ladies who could silence you with a single look. Both my grandmother and great-grandmother are posing in their portraits, not smiling but not really frowning either. They are still. Great-grandmother’s dress swishes to one side. What are they thinking? Are they happy to have their picture taken? Do they know that one day, they will be lovingly scratched in chalk and bathed in fluorescent lights for strangers to come up and look at them? When I look at the women in these drawings I see lives they aren’t ready to reveal. That’s probably how it should be. When you look at these drawings, I hope you see the joy as well as the mystery. They’re all haunting images, some more than others, but I think they also convey the warmth of their original subjects. Contributing writer Wren Fleming has published fiction in Earthwords, From Arthur’s Seat and Hillfire Anthology. She lives here in Des Moines.