'The world out there and the world in there - are both incomparably richer and deeper than one's feeble interpretations of it, which are usually spineless and illustrational and devoid of the unutterable mystery of the sheer existence of things.' Born in London in 1941, Robert Lenkiewicz' parents were Jewish refugees from Germany and Poland. They set up a series of accommodations for the elderly and eventually The Hotel Shem-tov, which had about sixty guests. Many of them had suffered greatly due to their experiences in wartime Europe leaving them deeply life-experienced and sometimes philosophical. Against this background, Lenkiewicz grew up with his two brothers. 'It was the most extraordinary place. I was introduced to mental illness, human suffering and death at a very early age and thought it salutary and thought provoking.' From the age of eleven Lenkiewicz these people sat for him as he painted them on huge canvases. Influenced by the Old Masters and Encouraged by his mother, he went to St. Martin's School of Art and then The Royal Academy Schools. His early years seem to have established one of the patterns of his life. He spent some years teaching in London but soon attracted people who found great difficulty in relating to the society they lived in. He set up a series of premises converted for the occupancy of vagrant and disturbed people. And he occupied his mind with their difficulties and painted them. Hampstead was not ready for this kind of thing however, and he was asked to leave by the police. So he moved to Cornwall and then Plymouth, where he continued to peruse a similar lifestyle. The paintings created during this period became VAGRANCY, the first of his long series of projects which he called 'The Relationships Series'. Robert Lenkiewicz died in his bed in August 2002 at the age of 60. Among his effects he left a collection of skulls and coffins, the skeleton of a 16th century witch, and the embalmed body of Edward McKenzie. McKenzie was a local tramp that Lenkiewicz had found living in a concrete container and subsequently named 'Diogenes', after the philosopher who lived in a barrel. When Diogenes died in 1982, Lenkiewicz had the body embalmed by a fellow of the British Institute of Embalmers. When the local health inspectorate came looking for the body, Lenkiewicz arranged things so that when the coffin was opened, Lenkiewicz himself leapt out wearing a sign marked 'Habeus corpus!' Lenkiewicz claimed to have had between two and three thousand relationships in his life-time. He is said to have fathered around 19 children by a number of different women. Many of these relationships became enshrined in his distinctive paintings. Robert Lenkiewicz had lived and painted in Plymouth for 30 years. His relationship with the city was always something of a love-hate affair. In later years however, he came to be a more accepted, if somewhat eccentric, local figure. Over 800 people went his memorial service held in the Plymouth Guildhall. 'I'd be quite strongly overcome by its absenteeism because I had so intensively registered its thereness, its existence, and suddenly was gone. One of the things that does this most effectively is an empty chair, particularly if someone's just been sitting there. . . Nothing haunts the mind more deeply than the plain fact of a thing. . . There's no regret, but there's a strong sense of the passing of things. Everything passes: an ineluctable condition of existence.' |
Robert Lenkiewicz