In his work People, New York City, Henry Orlik takes a unique approach, not focusing on portraiture but on the very archaeology of awareness. This drawing serves as a living palimpsest, where numerous identities have been inscribed, erased, and rewritten across the same psychic terrain. Each face emerges from and dissolves into others, akin to archaeological layers revealed through careful excavation. This suggests that individual selfhood is merely the surface manifestation of a deeper, collective awareness flowing beneath Manhattan's streets.

The composition of People, New York City reveals itself through what could be termed 'proxemic intimacy'—the haptic relationship between the viewer and the subject that coloured crayons uniquely afford. Unlike the monumental authority of Orlik's acrylic canvases, this work demands intimacy, fostering an almost conspiratorial communion between the observer and the image. The waxy texture of crayon deposits creates tactile empathy, as if the viewer might brush against these faces and feel their warmth. This material choice is crucial to Orlik's investigation: Metropolitan anonymity can only be penetrated through intimate encounters.

The most striking discovery within this neural landscape is the composition's subtle but unmistakable gravitational pull. Each vertical form, with its elongated faces, architectural suggestions, and fragmentary profiles, tilts inexorably toward the luminous circular forms that hover behind the figural elements. This tilting creates what can only be described as a vortex of awareness, a portal through which personal identity flows into something vastly more expansive. The circular forms themselves resist easy categorisation: they suggest simultaneously a watchful eye maintaining protective proximity to its human subjects, a cosmic aperture opening onto parallel dimensions, and the mandala-like structures that Carl Jung identified as symbols of psychological wholeness.

At the heart of this vortical phenomenon stand five distinct vertical presences, each maintaining sentinel-like vigilance over the human drama unfolding below. These figures are more than mere portraits; they function as archetypal witnesses to the metropolitan experience. The leftmost form suggests the immigrant is aware, alert, hypervigilant, processing every visual cue for signs of welcome or rejection. Adjacent stands the native observer, rooted yet curious, watching the endless flow of newcomers with a mixture of familiarity and wonder. The central figure embodies participation itself, fully engaged in the city's kinetic rhythm, whilst the fourth presence represents memory's keeper, collecting and preserving the ephemeral encounters that constitute metropolitan life. The rightmost sentinel functions as the integrator, synthesising disparate experiences into a collective understanding.

However, these five guardians operate simultaneously on deeper levels of meaning. They manifest the five senses personified: sight scanning the panorama, hearing processing sonic complexity, touch navigating physical proximity and distance, taste discriminating between authentic and artificial encounters, and smell detecting the invisible chemical signatures that mark territorial boundaries. Through this sensory quintet, Orlik suggests that civic experience requires the full orchestration of perceptual apparatus, each sense contributing essential intelligence to metropolitan survival.

The gravitational pull toward the kaleidoscopic portals carries profound ambivalence. The five vertical guardians do not merely observe the vortex; they are being inexorably drawn into it, their tilting forms suggesting imminent absorption into the cosmic apertures behind them. This creates a fundamental tension at the heart of Orlik's vision: Does the vortex represent transcendence or obliteration? Salvation or dissolution? For the displaced artist, this ambiguity proves particularly acute. The same forces that promise integration into universal awareness threaten the complete erasure of personal selfhood. The kaleidoscopic portals that transform scattered fragments into transcendent beauty simultaneously devour the very elements they reorganise.

The five guardians exist in the precise moment before absorption, caught between preservation and dissolution.

This liminal state reflects the condition itself: we seek connection whilst fearing engulfment and long for belonging whilst protecting autonomy. The drawing suggests that metropolitan experience constantly threatens to consume personal awareness, transforming people into mere fragments within larger patterns beyond their control or comprehension.

The choice of five proves significant beyond mere compositional convenience. Five resonates through mystical traditions across cultures: the five elements in Chinese philosophy (wood, fire, earth, metal, water), the five wounds of Christ marking sacred sacrifice, and the five pillars supporting the Islamic faith. Orlik's selection of this number suggests his intuitive recognition that civic experience requires sacred architecture, invisible supports that transform secular space into spiritual territory.

The vortex operates on multiple interpretive levels simultaneously. From a phenomenological perspective, it embodies Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of chiasmic intertwining, the interconnective tissue that binds the perceiver and the perceived. From a neurological standpoint, it mirrors the synaptic networks through which thoughts merge into larger patterns of meaning. From a spiritual dimension, it suggests the Buddhist concept of dependent origination, where all phenomena arise in relationship rather than isolation. Moreover, it suggests the profound ‘intelligence’ of God (the ‘Other’ or the ‘Source’) which Orlik believes will reveal all to us at our death. And simultaneously, it is the all-seeing eye, which contemplates the world and experiences it through the individual experiences of the individuals who reflect and take on the colours of the ‘eye’. It is consciousness itself.

Most significantly, this portal reading reveals Orlik's profound understanding of the immigrant condition. For the displaced artist, faces become texts requiring constant translation. Each encounter carries the weight of cultural interpretation: Which expressions signify welcome, which suggest threat, and which offer the possibility of belonging? The vortex suggests that this hypervigilant attention to physiognomy gradually dissolves the boundary between self and other, creating what might be termed "empathic overwhelm", the immigrant's peculiar gift of seeing faces as fragments of a larger human composition.

The five vertical guardians exist simultaneously across temporal dimensions. Each figure embodies the same awareness at different chronological moments: the arriving self, the adapting self, the established self, the remembering self, and the transcendent self, which integrates all temporal experiences into a unified understanding. This temporal multiplicity reflects quantum physics' recognition that particles exist in multiple states simultaneously until observation collapses possibility into actuality.

Technically, Orlik achieves this multidimensional effect through what might be called "palimpsest layering." Each face exists in multiple temporal states simultaneously: emerging into the definition, achieving momentary clarity, and dissolving back into possibility. This mirrors the cognitive process of navigation, where we continuously construct and reconstruct selfhood based on fragmentary visual information. A profile glimpsed in peripheral vision becomes a complete psychological narrative before revealing itself as a misperception; a familiar face transforms into a stranger through the subtle shift of changing light.

The work's relationship to Northern European artistic traditions proves illuminating. Where Albrecht Dürer's crowd scenes maintain physiognomic integrity even within dense compositions, and Pieter Bruegel's peasant faces preserve distinct characters despite their archetypal functions, Orlik pursues a different investigation. His face exists in a state of perpetual flux, suggesting that modernity has fundamentally altered the nature of selfhood itself. We no longer possess fixed physiognomies but rather somewhat fluid possibilities that shift according to context and the observer.

The drawing's temporal complexity deserves particular attention. These faces exist in what cognitive scientists term "the specious present", that brief moment where past perception, current experience, and anticipated future collapse into unified awareness. Each fragmented visage represents not a person but a moment of recognition, the instant when an anonymous encounter crystallises into a human connection before dissolving back into the metropolitan flow.

The circular forms behind the figures create what might be termed "depth of awareness" rather than mere spatial recession. They suggest that behind every visible face lies an infinite layer of possibility: the selves we might have become, the identities we temporarily inhabit, and the collective unconscious that shapes our expressions.

The vortex draws us into recognising that portraiture itself represents an impossible task, the attempt to capture a fluid process within a static form.

Orlik's unique position as a displaced European observing American dynamics adds a crucial interpretive dimension. European cities evolved gradually across centuries, allowing faces to settle into established social categories. American metropolitan experience, particularly in 1980s New York, presented something unprecedented: a space where selfhood remained permanently negotiable. The immigrant artist discovered in this fluidity both liberation and terror, the freedom to reconstruct identity, accompanied by the anxiety of perpetual uncertainty.

The work operates as Orlik's visual equivalent to William James's ‘stream of awareness’, that continuous flow of perception, memory, and anticipation that constitutes lived experience. However, where James investigated psychology, Orlik explores what might be termed "collective streaming": the way personal awareness merges into larger currents of shared human experience within metropolitan environments.

The colour choices contribute to this investigation of fluid selfhood. Earthy ochres suggest the material reality of flesh and bone, whilst cooler blue greys evoke the ethereal quality of thought itself. Strategic applications of vivid colour create focal points that anchor the composition whilst allowing surrounding elements to drift into atmospheric suggestion. This chromatic strategy mirrors the way attention operates within environments: moments of sharp focus surrounded by peripheral awareness of continuous movement and transformation.

The circular forms behind the five guardians reveal themselves as kaleidoscopic apertures, their internal geometries shifting and reforming like the fractured mirrors within those childhood instruments of wonder. This kaleidoscopic quality proves essential to Orlik's investigation. Just as a kaleidoscope transforms mundane fragments, broken glass, coloured beads, and scattered debris into patterns of transcendent beauty through systematic reflection and rotation, these cosmic portals suggest that metropolitan chaos contains hidden geometries of meaning.

And thus, Orlik's vision resists simple pessimism. The faces emerging from the vortex suggest that absorption does not equal annihilation but metamorphosis. What appears to be consumption reveals itself as creative transformation, personal selfhood dissolved only to be reconstituted in more complex, interconnected forms. The kaleidoscope does not destroy its fragments; instead, it arranges them into patterns of greater beauty and meaning.

The kaleidoscope metaphor operates with precision in the context of the immigrant experience. Each turn creates entirely new configurations from identical elements, mirroring how cultural displacement forces continuous reconstruction of selfhood from the same essential materials. The five vertical guardians stand witness to these endless reconfigurations, observing how the same human elements: hope, fear, longing, determination, and wonder, arrange themselves into infinite patterns of possibility.

More profoundly, the kaleidoscopic portal suggests that what we perceive as faces represents merely momentary arrangements of universal awareness. Each fragment of physiognomy —an eye, a profile, a suggestion of expression —exists simultaneously in multiple configurations, creating the illusion of discrete selfhood while revealing deeper patterns of connection. The kaleidoscope becomes Orlik's metaphor for enlightenment itself: the recognition that apparent multiplicity masks underlying unity, that the scattered fragments of metropolitan experience form coherent patterns when viewed through the proper optical instrument.

This paradox of threatened absorption embodies the essential drama of existence: the daily negotiation between maintaining personal integrity and surrendering to collective becoming. The five guardians represent different responses to this threat: resistance, acceptance, negotiation, transformation, and transcendence, suggesting that metropolitan awareness requires not the avoidance of the vortex but the courage to enter it whilst retaining essential selfhood.

This intimate investigation of human connection emerged from an artist's experience of profound isolation, financial pressure, and cultural displacement. The work's tenderness toward its subjects, the gentle way each face emerges into definition before dissolving back into possibility, suggests that Orlik discovered in anonymous encounters a form of salvation: the recognition that personal isolation represents illusion, that awareness itself operates as a collective phenomenon. The drawing's survival, given Orlik's precarious circumstances during his time in Manhattan, imbues it with additional poignancy.

In People, New York City, Henry Orlik achieved something remarkable: the visual equivalent of empathy itself. Through his palimpsest technique and the archetypal presence of his five vertical guardians, he renders visible the invisible threads that connect isolated individuals. The vortex suggests that beneath Manhattan's surface-chaos operates a deeper order, not the mechanical efficiency of planning but the organic intelligence of awareness recognising itself in countless forms. Each face becomes a mirror reflecting not personal selfhood but the universal capacity for recognition that transcends cultural, temporal, and spatial boundaries.

The circular forms thus function as Orlik's visual philosophy made manifest: awareness operates like a cosmic kaleidoscope, continuously creating new arrangements of beauty from the fundamental elements of human experience. The immigrant artist discovers that displacement represents not loss, but transformation —a turn of the kaleidoscope that reveals familiar elements in configurations previously unimaginable. Through this final metaphor, Orlik suggests that anonymity offers not alienation but liberation: the freedom to exist as fragments of light within an infinite instrument of cosmic creativity, forever forming new patterns of meaning within the eternal dance of metropolitan becoming. Orlik stated that, despite all his tribulations in New York, he had an overwhelming sense of “feeling free”.

These faces, caught forever in their moment of becoming, invite us into recognition that we, too, exist in states of perpetual transformation, forever tilting toward cosmic portals that promise either salvation or oblivion. This kaleidoscopic revelation transforms the drawing from portrait into prophecy, suggesting that awareness itself represents humanity's most sophisticated optical instrument, capable of discovering transcendent beauty within the scattered fragments of existence, even as it risks being consumed by the very patterns it creates.