In and Out of Jail is a stepped landscape made up of flat green plains with earth-coloured straight edges; the flat plains are broken up by arched shapes and a silver-blue ‘river’ runs throughout the landscape. At the bottom there is an archway over which water runs, which is made up of three arches with individual portcullises waiting to drop; the archways are reminiscent of gates to a city and a traceried Gothic church window. On the horizon (which seems quite close) is a crocheted ‘wall’ of intertwined dark red and yellow threads, a large archway is cut through and reveals the empty space behind, which continues above the flimsy wall. (Orlik paints a similar wall in Surreal Landscape which appears like an insubstantial cell-wall.) In the grey sky above, three shapes hover or float away: one like a square spiked crown, one like a rectangular sarcophagus and one like a parachute, sheet or shell.

In Orlik’s interior world, In and Out of Jail could be a vision of the mind in action - the flow of the watercourse with its off-shoots, forking paths and sudden drops. At points, the mind (our thoughts and feelings) is imprisoned (in jail), caught up in thought labyrinths of confusion, despair, illusion, habit, the everyday and memory. At other moments, moments of insight, inspiration, imagination and epiphany, the mind soars to higher plains. This raises the idea of the world of the commonplace (of Greek Chronos time) and the moments of meditation, inspiration and creation (Greek Kairos time) in which clock-time has no bearing, so that time can seem to flow, float and fly. Such moments of Kairos time are represented by the stylised, crown, sarcophagus and loose, floating parachute/shell/sheet which Orlik has used in other paintings. In Cannon Balloons, the crown appears as a damn structure – a moment of romantic fantasy (and escape) in a war-landscape. In Timeand Return Backwards, Orlik depicts sarcophagus-shaped objects which, with other symbolic objects, raise questions about time – relative time, in which time and space are intertwined and quantum time as a clock that ticks. The parachute shape is used by Orlik in his painting, Parachute. In In and Out of Jail it has a freer-form and is reminiscent of his shell-like night-gowns and sheets which represent dreams in his paintings Rest, Dream and Fire. They are the inspiration that sets his mind free.