- Introduction
- Biography
- Lenkiewicz: The Artist
- Early Work
- Themed Projects
- Project 1: Vagrancy
- Project 1a: Vagrancy
- Project 2: Death and the Maiden
- Project 3: Mental Handicap
- Project 4: Love and Romance
- Project 5: Love and Mediocrity
- Project 6: Paintings Designed to Make Money
- Project 7: Gossip on The Barbican
- Project 8: Jealousy
- Project 9: Orgasm
- Project 10: Self Portrait
- Project 11: Old Age
- Project 12: Suicide
- Project 13: Still Lives
- Project 14: The Painter With Mary
- Project 15: Death
- Project 16: Sexual Behaviour
- Project 17: Observations on Local Education
- Project 18: The Painter With Women
- Project 19: Landscape
- Project 20: Addictive Behaviour
- Project 21: Paintings Painted Blind - On The Theme Of Tobit
- Project 22: Still Lives II
- Project 23: Time
- Project 24: The Harrowing of Hell
- Non-Project Work
- Style and Technique
- Influences
- Exhibitions
- Murals
- Studios
- Popular Sitters
- Lenkiewicz: The Book Collector
- Lenkiewicz: The Philanthropist
- Lenkiewicz: The Writer
- Personal Memoirs
- Miscellaneous
Project 19: Landscape
The following brief explanation was contained in the booklet produced to accompany a Retrospective of Lenkiewicz's work in 1997.
"Everything takes form, even infinity." Bachelard.
"A lake is the earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." Thoreau.
In 1995 Lenkiewicz returned to an adolescent preoccupation - Landscape. In early youth he would stare out of the window from the bed he slept in, mesmerised as so many young people are, by the huge swathes of clouds mounted in the sky like a vast cathedral vault. It was difficult at that time to grasp that the sky ceiling was the largest dome on the planet, but one could certainly understand why clouds were called 'the thrones of gods'. A small exhibition of his at St. Martin's School of Art comprised of 20 drawings of steam, recorded from the trains at Paddington Station. Only in recent years has Lenkiewicz returned to working in isolation in woods or by a lake, where he planned a large project titled 'Landscape: The Painter as St. Jerome'. This project was intended as an enquiry into the relationship between natural forces and a single person. Forty of these paintings were shown at The Barbican Museum and Library Annexe. He wrote:
"In youth every window, every door opening framed the world outside. There were two kinds of space, the intimate space where I stood and the exterior space that one could believe expanded consciousness. The larger the space observed the more timeless, meditative, even exalted one could feel. Space has been termed a 'Psychological transcendent'. The larger the context in which we stand, the greater our solitude. Our eye eliminates boundaries, nothing contradicts; distance shuts off moral codes."
In student days when Lenkiewicz visited The National Gallery, which was frequently, he was struck by the images of St. Jerome, and in particular a small panel by Patinier. From the early 17th Century images of St. Jerome had developed into theatrically lit excuses for recording sinewed, taut and wasted elderly men - almost an illustration for medical students studying anatomy, of cadaverous musculature. Before this phase however, St. Jerome would be hard to find, as he sat lost in a vast, stony and desolate landscape traversing rivers, forests and mountain peaks. The clear purpose of such imagery was existential; man lost, missing, in a terrifying infinity. Man insignificant. Images like these are the stuff of tragedy; late Michelangelo, late Goya, late Rothko. Lenkiewicz wrote:
"All human enterprise seems to evaporate into the vapours that we inhale and exhale by seeing. Seeing is eating, our visual mouth can swallow universes, exhale the starry night. When we are moved we are filled. To be touched by things is to be made smaller, to be diminished. In one aesthetic mood we ride clouds and leapfrog oaks, in another we sleep beneath a leaf and nestle with insects. Space is a state of mind, agoraphobic and claustrophobic. We are strangely haunted by events that are innocent of themselves, we do not cry "Show off" to nature. We are silenced into meditative irony, diminished and expanded, an elastic perception of minutiae one moment and infinity the next. "
In future developments of this project Lenkiewicz intends to expand the themes of Earth, Air, Fire and Water.
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