Though his paintings have become extraordinarily sought-after in sell-out shows at the John Martin gallery in London, Andrew Gifford is never prepared to allow this to influence his work. He continues to experiment with more formalized paintings in his abstracted series of Line Paintings, as well as with his Light Works, exhibiting his Ganzfeld light installation at a recent London art fair. Light is the consistent theme in the work of Andrew Gifford, whether in his grey urban daytime or neon-lit cityscapes, the vast open landscape paintings of his adopted home in the southwest of France or in the extraordinary optical effects of his light projections.
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After moving to Plymouth in 1969, the artist attracted so many vagrants and street alcoholics that Lenkiewicz was forced to commandeer derelict warehouses to house them. One of these warehouses also served as a studio and in 1973 became the exhibition space for the Vagrancy Project. The Vagrancy Project consisted in paintings of the vagrants and a large book of notes written by the ‘dossers’ themselves and those involved in their care and control. The format of the ‘Project’ – combining thematically linked paintings with the publication of research notes and the collected observations of the sitters – was to be used consistently throughout Lenkiewicz’s career. Projects such as Mental Handicap (1976), Old Age (1979), Suicide (1980), and Death (1982), continued to examine the lives of ostracised, hidden sections of the community.

In a parallel line of inquiry, Lenkiewicz often adopted a metaphorical pictorial style to portray human physiology in a state of crisis in Projects such as Love & Mediocrity (1976), Jealousy (1977), Orgasm (1978) and The Painter with Mary (1981). These Projects examined ‘the falling in love experience’ and led the artist to believe that the physiology of desire itself was ‘the straight road to fascism’ – the tendency to treat another person as property. His own observations were supported by his 25,000 volume private library, which contained large sections on philosophy, theology, fascism, anti-Semitism, the witchcraft phenomenon and the occult, and which he viewed as a history of ‘fanatical belief systems’. Lenkiewicz concluded that the kinds of sensations people felt when a lover abandoned them or when their cherished beliefs were threatened were identical to the withdrawal symptoms and anxieties experienced by addicts or alcoholics. The Projects thus became an extended study in ‘addictive behaviour’ – the title of his 20th Project, unfinished at the time of his death.

Robert Lenkiewicz died on 5 August 2002 from a serious heart condition. In his obituary of Lenkiewicz, art critic David Lee observed: ‘Robert’s greatest gift was to show us that an artist could be genuinely concerned about social and domestic issues and attempt the difficult task of expressing this conscience through the deeply unfashionable medium of figurative painting. In that sense he was one of few serious painters of contemporary history.’
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