‘I am responsible for the world because I am the world.’

(Henry Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994)

In American Landscape six tipis form a derelict Native American village, set amongst a landscape of writhing dunes. All that is left of the tipis are the tent poles and the tipi cloth coverings which traditionally were made from buffalo hide. These are now black in colour and seem like ghostly phantoms, disembodied cloaks or creeping, amorphous creatures which envelope, stifle and overwhelm the tipi poles. Like heavy dark clouds, the black shapes are the smoke of the campfires which incarnated the life of the village and as earth-bound smoke signals, they send sad messages. The tent poles are the ghosts of the flames of the now non-existent campfires. The wooden poles are also deer antlers, spirit animals of the tipis, and the embodiment of shamanic spirits which reunite the living and dead in a circular Ghost Dance. The sticks rise like flames from the ashes, sending the spirits skyward.

The natural hues used in the decorations of the Native American village have bled out into the landscape, warming the dunes with beautiful earth shades of soft pinks, lilacs, subtle greens and aqua shades suggesting oases of jewel-like water. The colours fade into the hazy distance to merge with the horizon. Symbolic of the connection to the land, animals and the natural world, the colours, used in rock art, clothing and basket weaving, came from the land and have returned to the land. And while no trace of the ancestral human population remains here, their spirit abides and has been taken up and merged in a writhing mass of living landscape. The land and people are one.

Orlik presents a harmonious, moving landscape which allows for the sadness of the dark shapes but by ‘treating each shape as if it were a world in itself’ he affirms ‘its existence even to the invisible depth of its microscopic agitations of atoms.’ (Henry Orlik, ‘An explanation of my method’, 1985). Orlik believes, ‘There is no separateness in reality, everything flows into one another, everything is related, as is everything in my painting.’ (Henry Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994). And so, Orlik commemorates not ‘transience but the strength of existence’ which is remembered and embedded in American Landscape. (Henry Orlik, ‘An explanation of my method’, 1985).