PROJECT 17: OBSERVATIONS ON LOCAL EDUCATION.

THE GLUE SNIFFER.
53 x 53 inches. Oil on canvas.
PROJECT: OBSERVATIONS ON LOCAL EDUCATION.
Private Collection.

In 1988 Lenkiewicz exhibited 150 paintings on the theme of Education. There were over 500 sitters ranging from the Chief Education Officer to lavatory attendants. He edited two large volumes where each of the sitters wrote 1000 words or more on their feelings about education. These books were introduced by a series of observations written by Michael Duane, Headmaster of Rising Hill School in London. Duane was one of the few sitters with a deeply child-centred instinct. In different ways other sitters that Lenkiewicz had the privilege to work with; Dr. Reuven Feuerstein, Dora Russell, Colin Wilson, Ivor D. Eliot, shared this quajity but it was rare. Lenkiewicz wrote:

"Education, as we experience it in 'civilised' societies,is primarily concerned with the linking of human behaviour to commercial enterprise ... the conscription character of schooling, the effects of isolation amongst large numbers of other people, examinations, and destructive forms of competition, are patterns of control. Sensuality, energy and amoral curiosity frighten the adult, and the adult will fear the child."

Some of the canvasses were huge; The Blind Leading the Blind, Caritas Romanus, Staff at The Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Strait-jacketed Girls - former pupils, Public High for Girls, Ivor D. Eliot with a group of children at Ilfracombe School working with 'Philosophy for Children', Triptych: The Massacre of the Innocents (the left and right panels depicting Saint Vocation and Saint Myopia). One of the largest, The Deposition - The Burial of Education, based on Mahler's Songs on The Death of Children, shows the painter wrapped in a union jack, lowering a dying child in the format of El Greco's Burial of Count Orgaz.
Lenkiewicz noted a conversation with an explorer who asked a young boy in the Amazon to point out his father from among the tribes people, the boy slapped the man's face and with offended passion said, "I belong to no-one, at this moment you are my father."
Lenkiewicz writes,

"The young persons sensitivity to example is immeasurable. A parent or mentor whose creative life is passionless, dulled and uninspired, will have great difficulty in valuing themselves ... We do not value another person by feeling superior or inferior to them. That is the straight road to fascism. That we may mean the young harm is a very unattractive thought, but refutation is tenuous when we observe our schooling procedures. "

He concluded his remarks in the catalogue to the Exhibition with the observation that:

"I barely recollect a moments depression in my life and I am certainly of an optimistic nature. The projects that I work on are academic surveys of aspects of human behaviour They attempt to assimilate information impartially. Of the 17 large projects I have worked on in recent years, this one on the theme of Education has been the least salutary and the most sinister and depressing. "