Tykes said:
Most of her work was created between 1930's and 1960's, and as far as I know her main influences were the reinassance artists and former surrealists as Marx Ernst. I read in wikipedia that Lenkiewicz was born in 1941 so I don't think that Leonora was paying homage to him, but who knows.
She was interested in esoteric knowledge, there are several esoteric elements in her work (hermeticism, alchemy), apparently she used to read Gurdjieff and texts like The White Goddess by Robert Graves among others.
Though maybe this esoteric elements have a purely aesthetic function, since she declared herself unable to explain the symbolism in her work as well that the surrealism vein came more from the influence of Mark Twain and Lewis Carrol.
From the wiki-link I provided:
"Over forty years Lenkiewicz built up a library of some 25,000 volumes[5] devoted to art,
the occult sciences, demonolatry, magic, philosophy, especially metaphysics, alchemy, death, psychology and sexuality, preoccupations which surface in some of his paintings. His collection of books on magic and witchcraft was one of the finest in private hands and was largely sold at Sotheby's in 2003, and a substantial part of the remainder of his library was sold at auction in May 2007 by Lyon & Turnbull."
and
"On and off, for nearly 30 years, he worked his great masterpiece, the Riddle Mural in the Round Room at Port Eliot house, home of the Earl of St. Germans. Sadly, he died before its completion. Half of the mural, in the 40-foot-diameter (12 m) room, shows
death, destruction, insanity, unrequited love, and the apocalyptic end of the world. The other half reflects love and affection, friendships, harmony, proportion and consensus. Hidden in the work are various references to family skeletons, art history and cabalistic mysteries, hence the name - the Riddle Mural."
If nothing else, IMO, they seem to have had some mutual interests.
