Green Fountain, NYC marks a pivotal moment in the artist's documented American period (1980-1985), which was executed during his residency in Manhattan. Within the broader context of post-war British art, this work positions Orlik alongside contemporaries such as David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj. However, Orlik's approach, unlike Hockney's sun-drenched California observations or Kitaj's pop-influenced collages, reveals more profound affinities with the metaphysical urban visions of Giorgio de Chirico and the psychological architectures of Max Ernst, artists whose works he had exhibited alongside during London's 1970s surrealist revival. This unique perspective sets Orlik apart and invites the audience to delve deeper into his work.

This coloured pencil study reveals Orlik's sophisticated approach to urban psychology, presenting what appears to be not topographical documentation but rather the interior space where civic meaning is constructed. The work distinguishes itself from contemporary American urban interpreters through its fundamentally psychological rather than sociological approach to the metropolitan experience.

The composition centres on an extraordinary paradox: a fountain balanced precariously upon children's building blocks within a cave-like psychological chamber. This surreal foundation transforms what should be a symbol of civic permanence into something fragile and playful. The juxtaposition suggests that our grandest urban monuments rest upon the same creative impulses that drive childhood construction.

Orlik's choice of coloured pencil proves crucial to the work's effect. Unlike his monumental acrylic canvases, the scale of this work requires close viewing, fostering a private communion between the observer and the image.

The building blocks themselves, rendered in specific colours of purple, orange, and blue against muted earth tones, are not randomly chosen. These primary and secondary hues suggest the fundamental elements from which all visual experience is constructed, connecting the child's play materials to the artist's creative process. The fountain emerges from this foundation of pure colour, transformed into something both architectural and organic.

Rising from the fountain's basin, serpentine green forms twist upward with a DNA-like helical structure. These are not merely decorative waterspouts, but manifestations of the life force itself: the qi that Orlik believes animates all existence. Their bioluminescent quality, set against the predominantly monochromatic environment, creates the work's central tension between constructed civilisation and flowing natural energy.

The cave-like enclosure, achieved through dense cross-hatching, functions as a theatre of consciousness rather than an actual urban space. Floating within this darkness are lighter, cloud-like forms that operate as apertures or portals, suggesting openings through which eternal principles might penetrate temporal experience. This psychological container recalls both Plato's cave and the primordial grottos where humanity first encountered sacred springs. Orlik’s drawing Californian Sphinx references the Oracle at Delphi (in conversation, Saturday 31st June 2025) and in Green Fountain, NYC, there is the same suggestion of connection to another world of spirit and oracle, an idea carried forward more prosaically in any urban ‘commonplace’ wishing well. Here, Orlik manifests the idea of the deep yearning for a sensed, sacred knowledge in the hard world of material existence which here, imaginatively and enchantingly, seems tantalisingly perceptible.

It is interesting to note Orlik’s use of three serpents as the number three has spiritual and mystical significance reaching back to the Ancient Greeks and earlier. In the Pythagorean school, three is the symbol of perfection and the divine. It is the foundational cosmic triangle (time, space and matter) as a fundamental building block of the universe which can form complex, platonic solids, and sacred geometry (balance, harmony and completion) interconnecting consciousness with the fundamental principles of the universe. It is past, present and future and birth, life and death. Another of Orlik’s sketches, entitled Wind, likewise delineates three twisting, intertwining elements: an embracing couple and the third symbolic element which is love. This similarly references the Christian Trinity, the Hindu Trimurti and the Dao De Jing (chapter 42) where the way (dao) gives birth to two (yin and yang) and the two combine to form the third – the state of harmony and balance. This then gives rise to the ‘myriad things’ – life itself.

The fountain likely references Central Park's Bethesda Fountain, though filtered through Orlik's transformative, vision. For the artist, Central Park represented an essential refuge from Manhattan's 'imposing, angry energy.' However, the profoundly interior quality of this composition suggests that the park's importance lies not in physical escape but in psychic necessity: the space where urban dwellers construct meaning from the metropolitan experience.

Orlik's transformative vision inspires a new understanding of urban spaces and their role in our lives. The work's theatrical, almost model-like quality reveals all civic architecture as partial performance, elaborate constructions designed to convince us of our permanence and dignity.

However, Orlik's vision is neither cynical nor dismissive. By revealing the toy foundations beneath our civic gestures, he illuminates the remarkable persistence of human creativity. The fountain continues to flow not because of institutional permanence but because it serves fundamental human needs that transcend political arrangements.

This piece exemplifies Orlik's 'quantum painting' philosophy on an intimate scale. Each pencil mark represents the 'excitation' of energy at the subatomic level, the invisible forces that bind matter. The varying intensity of mark-making creates a topography of energy, with the fountain serving as a focal point where cosmic forces gather and disperse throughout the urban environment. This philosophy underlines Orlik's belief in the interconnectedness of all things, a concept that he sought to express through his art.

The scale distortion, rendering the fountain almost miniaturised, reinforces the psychological rather than geographical nature of the space. We witness not Central Park but the interior architecture where civic virtue is remembered and reconstructed. The work suggests that all meaningful encounters with urban space occur partially within the realm of consciousness, where individual experience meets collective memory.

Green Fountain, NYC, stands apart from Orlik's more confrontational urban visions, such as Fighting Skyscrapers from the same period. While Fighting Skyscrapers depicts a more aggressive and chaotic urban environment, Green Fountain, NYC suggests that the city functions as a collaborator rather than an antagonist in creating spaces where contemplation remains possible. The work captures Orlik's evolving understanding that urban experience is fundamentally constructed, built from the same playful impulses that drive childhood creativity.

In the context of 1980s artistic responses to American urbanism, Orlik's approach differs significantly from the social realism of his contemporaries or the emerging neo-expressionist movements. His psychological surrealism maintains stronger connections to the European tradition whilst engaging distinctly American subjects, positioning him as a unique voice in the transatlantic artistic dialogue of the period. The fountain, precariously balanced within a chamber of the mind, becomes a symbol of humanity's eternal longing for gathering places where the sacred and the mundane intersect.

Ultimately, Green Fountain, NYC presents what may be interpreted as the psychological architecture of civic life: the interior spaces where meaning is assembled from fundamental elements. The serpentine green forms rising from toy blocks suggest that despite the apparent instability of our constructions, something essential continues to flow through them. The work demonstrates Orlik's documented capacity to reveal, within artificial environments, patterns that he believed connected humanity to deeper archetypal inheritance.

The drawing serves as a testament to the artist's stated belief that consciousness itself functions as an architect, constructing significance from basic elements while remaining connected to what he termed the flowing force of life, which no amount of urban development can contain or control. Within the documented trajectory of Orlik's American period, this work represents a crucial counterpoint to his more confrontational urban interpretations, suggesting an artist capable of finding both conflict and sanctuary within the same metropolitan environment.