PROJECT 10: SELF-PORTRAIT.

You Gave Me a Dead Rose/Mary I Gave You a Dead Rat?
Oil on Board, 22 inches x 16 inches. 1979.

Lenkiewicz has always painted his image in the mirror. A number of very early as well as very recent examples are in this Exhibition. In 1978 he noted:

"All paintings are 'self' portraits', only I do not believe in a 'self'. We identify an individual by the boundary their body forms, but that is nothing to do with 'self'. 'Self', like 'Justice', 'Truth', 'Beauty', is poetry. "

The large painting in the present Exhibition titled: The Dead Painter Surrounded by his Children and Companions, relates a number of formulas to the single theme of ET IN ARCADIA EGO. 'I death, am in Arcadia also'. Amongst these formulas are the 'Deposition', the 'Pieta'; and a number of 'Anatomy Lessons'. The self-portrait in this picture is a parody of the death of his own mother and a drawing by Andre Slom of Courbet on his deathbed. There were further thoughts in relation to Munch's Chamber of Death 1892, Daumier's 'We can set that one free, He's no longer dangerous'. Lenkiewicz wrote:

"They surround me, while I live they will always, set me free'. It is unnecessary to wait for my death, I am given leave to 'die' within them - long before. Dispensibility is death. I shall always be dispensable. For as long as I 'live' l 'die'. "

Lenkiewicz also associated this image with Delacroix's 'The Death of Sardanapalus' 1827, and Rembrandt's 'Anatomy Lessons' of Tulp and Deyman. It was Joseph Wright of Derby's painting, 'A Philosopher giving a Lecture on the Orrery' however, that struck Lenkiewicz as an appropriate metaphor. He had been taken by Nietzsche's remark from Beyond Good & Evil:

"There are countless dark bodies which must be inferred to lie near the sun; we shall never be able to see them. Among ourselves that is a parable; a moral psychologist needs the whole language of the stars as only an allegorical and symbolic language. Many things can be kept dark with it."

Lenkiewicz's notes continue:

"...   Dead but lit by attending candles from my orbit. Each their own sun, awaiting their extinguished moment...child-philosophers stare in passionless silence at my passing. "

He quotes Edward Young in 1759:

"Born originals how comes it to pass that we die copies? "