Central Park Hustler is one of Orlik’s most enigmatic, mysterious and profound works of art filled with secret messages and signs.

Orlik was brought up in England by his mother, Lucyna who was deeply committed to her Eastern Orthodox faith and his father, Josef, who desperately wanted him to be Polish. His parents sent to him to a Polish boarding school in Herefordshire when he was five from their resettlement camp in Fairford, Gloucestershire. The Roman Catholic school was “like a monastery” and run by monks. Orlik subsequently rebelled from his religious upbringing and refused to go to church after the age of thirteen, but he continued to have a deeply personal relationship with “his God” who he believed “had tested him unremittingly” all his life and yet who he remained faithful to, in his way. His religious beliefs are rooted in a Christian understanding, and he often draws on the Bible to describe his paintings, and he has a great love of Christ who he believes to have been “a rebel”. However, with his explorative mind, different ideas have opened themselves up to Orlik, and he has embraced the concepts of a quantum world which spiritually supports mystical Perennialism and owes much to a Daoist understanding of the world.

Central Park Hustler draws references from The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca (c. 1448-1450). This painting hangs in the National Gallery in London, which Orlik haunted while he lived in South Kensington, before he travelled to America. It hangs in the same gallery as Botticelli’s Venus and Mars (1483) which Orlik drew inspiration from in his painting Resting After Work.

Piero della Francesca’s Baptism has influenced many contemporary artists. David Hockney recounts his life-long interest in the painting which features in his paintings My Parents (1977) and Looking at Pictures on a Screen (1977). The National Gallery recently brought the paintings together in the exhibition: ‘Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look’ (2024) which they saw as promoting the art of “slow looking”. Rachel Whiteread describes her ‘intimate relationship’ with Piero’s Baptism, which influenced her career-launching sculpture Ghost (1990, National Gallery of Art, Washington). Both Whiteread and Hockney were affected by the perspective and stillness, - the ‘silent painting’ - of the Baptism and its ‘fantastic construction’ (Hockney) and ‘clarity of vision’.

Orlik likewise appreciated Piero’s genius with perspective and stillness and the sparseness of his paintings is reflected in many of Orlik’s own works. The lack of shadow which renders many of Piero’s sculptures as statuesque may be seen in Orlik’s own paintings, in which he uses shadow very specifically as a suggestive device, often hiding clues in his paintings to create dual or multiple meanings.

In Central Park Hustler, Orlik’s overwhelming response to the subject matter of Baptism comes together in one of his most visionary works. Like Piero’s painting, it is divided into several planes demarcated by what seem like disparate, unattached objects.

In the centre right side of Orlik’s drawing, a naked woman disrobes, lifting her white shift over her head so we cannot see her face. She is temporarily blinded. The landscape around her is a snow-scene and icicles hang from the top of the drawn frame. It seems incongruous that this woman is undressing in a snowy Central Park. Her posture recalls the strange figure in Piero’s Baptism, who faces in the other direction to her, but stands similarly disrobing, in what appears very modern underwear (‘y-fronts’, Hockney). In Piero’s painting in this moment of undressing, the man is missing the beautiful still moment of benediction in the foreground which is the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist who stands by his side. Christ is accompanied by three angels who stand next to him on the other side and the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove hovers over His head. The shell that John uses to tip the water is laced with gold. It is a moment of pure and profound stillness which the man could have witnessed but in the prosaic act of changing he has missed one of the most profound spiritual moments in the Christian story. Orlik’s woman, likewise, misses all the action in her picture – she literally is turning her back on it.

In the very front of Orlik’s drawing, flowers in a mushroom shaped vase stand on a patch of earth in what seems like a window or doorway. If the viewer tilts their head to the right, they will see that the patch of earth becomes the silhouette of the profile face of Christ, with the moustache of his beard jutting over the indent of his mouth. He is the earth, the terrestrial (and spiritual) ground of being. The vase becomes a memorial vase, the kind that is placed on a grave, and the positioning of the flowers, on Christ’s forehead transforms the flowers into the crown of thorns.

Quantum mechanics observe that at the core level of reality, particles can manifest in different forms, which physicists are now witnessing. Similarly, in Orlik’s drawing, the bunch of flowers can also be a symbolic crown of thorns. Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment discloses the ‘observer effect’ of physics whereby the observed changes by being observed by the observer. This leads to the conclusion that in this work of art, we, the observer, must decide what we see. As Orlik is fond of saying: are we glass half empty or full; the crown of thorns or the bunch of flowers?

If the viewer tilts their head to the left, the X on the side of the box in the middle distance, behind the woman’s turned back, becomes a cross which points directly at Christ’s face. This is the crucifixion and death of Christ. On top of the box sits a set of magnificent antlers. Christ was sometimes depicted as a stag in medieval art and here the antlers represent him and become a shamanic symbol of spiritual connection – a bridge between the worlds of spirit and matter, as Christ is both spirit and human body. The box is opened to reveal a spider-like crack in the ice on its top. This is the Resurrection – the open box is Christ’s empty tomb with the stone rolled away. The naked woman is revealed as a modern-day Mary Magdalene who here denies her chance, like the figure in Piero’s Baptism, to witness an extraordinary epoque-defining moment. The flowers suggest Fra Angelico’s painting Noli me Tangere (1440-41), but here there will be no telling of that story, no meeting in the garden (John 20.17) because the woman is deaf to what is going on around her; her head is covered and muffled. The moment is reversed and it is she that will not touch Christ. She misses her life-changing moment and remains firmly in the background, oblivious to the miracle occurring right in front of her. The relatability of the disrobing figure is startling and haunting because it is so prosaic – the everyday act of taking off a shirt. Set in Central Park, the moment becomes stark, startling and revealing.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder illustrates how easy it is to miss the breathtaking moment when the shepherd and farmer overlook Icarus’s doomed flight (Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1560), commemorated in W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux-Arts’ in which the poet suggests humanity’s indifference to suffering. Similarly, Stanley Spencer collapses time in his visionary paintings so that The Resurrection, Cookham (1924-27) and Christ Carrying the Cross (1920) occurs in his beloved Cookham, in contemporary time amongst ordinary people where unique occurrences blur with the everyday and happen alongside the commonplace; so, Orlik places the whole Easter story in Central Park like an enigmatic Passion Play.

The box becomes Pandora’s box, where hope is the last thing to remain inside after the evils have been released into the world. Hope remains and here, Orlik suggests, it is in the God that lies resting, quiet and waiting, in the life-giving soil. He is the terrestrial God of matter and life and is renewed (resurrected) with the miracle of every flower or plant that grows. Here, he rests on the threshold of a door and Orlik has specifically drawn the frame of the door, bringing to mind William Holman Hunt’s culturally influential painting, The Light of the World (1851-1854) which is accompanied by the text, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock’ (Revelation 3,20). As Blake admonishes us to cleanse our ‘doors of perception’, Orlik has positioned Christ right at the front of his painting waiting to open our closed minds.

A wind-powered water pump stands behind the woman and on closer study, the wheel of the pump may be seen to be a clock with small hands that stand at half past three. Jesus was believed to have resided in his tomb from three o’clock (the ninth hour) on Good Friday until just before dawn on Easter Sunday, the day of his resurrection. However, there is no standard movement of time in this drawing which distils all time into one moment and another time discloses itself in the shading on the clock. The lower six parts are in shadow, and the clock is revealed as a sundial. The upper section is coming into light – the light after the darkness of the Crucifixion. The dawn is unfolding to reveal the tomb which was found to be empty by the women who came to anoint Christ’s body.

To add to the sacral experience of the drawing, the shapes between the flame-like icicles are shaped like a parade of hooded monk-like figures, or saints in a stained-glass window. The wind which is blown towards the box and blows it open (revealed by deft lines of pencil) is the Holy Spirit which breathes life into the antlers. The ends of the antlers replicate plants that grow and pertinently, the horns nearest the windmill become a swallow which represents Christ, in relation to resurrection and hope, as the swallow returns each year in the spring, the time of rebirth and new life.

Orlik places “all of reality” in his drawing. The four elements: the wind (air) from the windmill, which is the spirit (the breath) of life; the water which is drawn by the windmill and is the ice waiting to thaw, and more symbolically, is Christ, Himself, as the ‘living water’; the earth which is represented by the face of Christ, the son of the earth, from which all creation grows; and a discreet reference to fire in the icicles which hang from the door-frame which are shaped (and coloured with a touch of orange) as flames – they are melting. Amazingly, the icicle-flames subtly replicate the fringe on Christ’s forehead in Piero’s Baptism. Christ is the ‘living flame’ of life and salvation.

In an alternate reading of the drawing, this Mary Magdalene, the New York Hustler, is not oblivious to Christ and has not missed his appearance in the garden. She has seen him visit her barren, icy landscape and she has been altered. She is one of the figures in (psychological and spiritual) prison who has been awakened by Christ’s message when he harried hell on Easter Saturday (1 Peter 3: 18-21). She removes her shirt in the snow that surrounds her – she is warmed by his message of love and is ready to face all the elements, to be ‘saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also – not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ’ which neatly ties further Piero’s Baptism with Orlik’s drawing. The frozen psychological ground, Orlik suggests, can be thawed by Christ who is the flowing spirit of creation, the living waters, just as the cycle of the seasons leads to the cyclical rebirth of the natural world.

Orlik believes his qi guides his hand creating the ‘living line’ of his creative calling, as the qi, flows from the dao, like water, which runs through all living things. Christ, in Orlik’s drawing, is drawn from the muddy ground in Piero’s Baptism on which Christ stands by the side of the water. In the Dao de Jing the dao is ‘yielding, like ice about to melt’ and is likened to an opaque muddle puddle which eventually settles and clears (Lao Tzu, Chapter 15) and it is ‘the gate of all mystery’; here, the two cosmologies seem intertwined in Orlik’s drawing.