Creamy & Sticky

Monday through Friday, David Lene-man paints silk ties and blouses. His shimmering cravat art--fauns, peonies, moons, banjos--is strictly for cash. But on weekends he goes out to the garage back of his Hollywood house and paints for fun, in the most enjoyable way he knows.

Leneman's Sunday art, which went on exhibition in a Los Angeles gallery last week, is as rich, sweet and indigestible as a double fudge sundae with caramel sauce. His cakey circus clowns, blobbed Bible scenes and dripping bouquets made many gallerygoers smile. But fellow artists were impressed. "How," they kept asking, "does he get his effects?"

Those who had watched Leneman at work could report that, whether or not he quite achieved his ends, his means and his theories were disarming. Leneman paints with his fingers, an activity he took up in Warsaw, at 14. Leneman's parents had taken away his brushes to make the boy spend more time at his books, but they forgot to take away his paints. So Leneman started smearing his inspirations directly on the canvas; daubing, lumping, clutching, rubbing and pinching to heighten the drama. Then, in Palestine and Paris, he brought finger-painting to a fine pitch. Later he taught art in Venezuela and U.S. Army hospitals.

Now a bouncy, talkatively intense 40, Leneman is proud of being a family man (three children) as well as an artist. Explaining that he scratches thin lines with his fingernails, he adds, with a wistful look at his chubby hands, that his nails used to be longer "but I always scratched my wife and she made me cut them."

Leneman reasons that brushes are merely extensions of the fingers; he prefers to do without them because finger-painting gives him "a much closer physical relationship. I like directness, I'm impatient, and a good painting is a good painting even if it's done with the nose."

Leneman paints with emotional haste and seldom spends more than a day on one picture. "My method is practical," he says. "My paintings play and sing and dance." Critics were not inclined to go that far, but they did generally agree that the paintings have a creamy, baroque sweetness all their own. Even if it adds up to little more than a sticky hobby, Leneman's art works wonders with a method otherwise usually used to keep kids busy on rainy afternoons.

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