Rembrandt Revisited – The Painter in Plymouth
by Andrew Griffin

Something is happening in Plymouth, in fact for the past thirty years something has indeed been taking place in the old naval city. The city has broken from a fundamentalist stupor, and woken up and embraced Robert Lenkiewicz.
Lenkiewicz is today producing work so shockingly vibrant that even his most vehement critics have stirred from artistic narcolepsy and shocked indignation to appreciate the best portrait artist this country has ever produced or even seen.

Much of Roberts work through the years has been multimedia based. Paintings accompanied by esoteric texts on various challenging aspects of various kinds–philosophical social essays on the human experience, death, vagrancy, withdrawal–sex and relationships, both ailments and joys of the soul which permeate and shape the human psyche.

One of the most poignant of Roberts projects are his works concerning vagrancy and alcoholism.

« 'Bishop' in Stoke Damerel churchyard–Oil on parachute. Painter's collection

These paintings are a savage montage of human folly, misery and damp meths-soaked deaths.

From Roberts early days in London, to recent years in Plymouth, he allowed his studio to be populated by a challenging cross section of heroin addicts, alcoholics and other damaged street people, all lost on varying planets, as they wrenched their lives and brains from bottle to bottle, fix to fix.

“When I looks
at yer
pictures of
the lads
I feels like
I’m in a mortuary.”
Black Sam

From the outset, Robert never attempted to moralise or intellectualise about the condition of these people, they simply were who they were and usually did what they did for a multitude of reasons, often to simply disappear from view.

'The Lynch' Oil on canvas »
Private collection

Lenkiewicz seemed not to want to save these people for God, or even to save these people from themselves, but simply to give a place to sleep away from some of the dangers– and be able to to commit the inevitable, drink themselves blind and paint the consequences.

“Come now boy we have work to do, those poly students dig deep rattle pockets, me legs are lagged an’ me guts ache, we need to break ice quick like, I’ve no Giro for Cairo and I’m shakin’ like a rocker.”—Unknown. Plymouth Bus Station 1990