Reality depicts a sparse landscape, the upper two thirds of which comprises the sky with an ill-defined band of hazy pink indicating the horizon which separates the grey sky above and green ground below. Snaking blood-red rivers wind through the green ground, some of which have tributaries which merge with other rivers on their universal route until they disappear into the indistinct horizon. Above them sharp, spiky, pale yellow bolts of lightning break-up the grey sky, like pointing fingers which reach down to poke at the rivers below; their jaggedness acts as a foil to the curving rivers which run like veins or arteries through the landscape.

Orlik wrote: ‘Reality consists of both waves (relationships) and particles (individuality). The wave particle duality is a good metaphor for the deeply integrated mind body relationship. The materialist claims that the physical aspects of reality are all there is, and that mental and spiritual aspects are either dependant on matter or they don’t exist.’ (Henry Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994). Here Orlik represents these ideas in pictorial form so that the lightning represents the mind (the spirit), and the veiny rivers are the veins in the body. The mind sends shockwaves (thoughts and inspiration) to the body which then acts. If this is taken further, and the red veins become the defined veins on the hands, then the lightning bolts directly act on the hands and for the artist, they become brainwaves which stab the self producing the inspiration or impulse to create. Orlik described his act of creation in terms of Daoist qi [ch’i]: ‘The ‘living line’ is a technique of movement or animation. The untrammelled line expressing emotion and impulse. The Chinese call this Ch’i – life’s motion, animation. A cosmic spirit that vitalises all things that gives life and growth to nature, movement to water and energy to man. It infuses all things animate and inanimate. The artist must fill himself with that energy, so that in a moment of inspiration he may become the vehicle for its expression. The artist can feel the Ch’i flow down his arm through his brush on the canvas. With the spontaneous movement of the brush, in which the strokes vary in thickness, weight, speed and intensity he can make manifest subconscious feelings.’ (Henry Orlik, 1985)

Similarly, the red rivers are representative of all veins and all life in all bodies and as such the landscape is a microcosm and the lightning bolts represent moments of inspiration or epiphany which jolt the body into action. W B Yeats said: ‘The lightning of inspiration is the power of genius…’ and described how the ‘descending power is neither the winding nor the straight line but the zig-zag, illuminating the passive and active properties, … it is the sudden lightning for all his acts of power are instantaneous. We perceive in a pulsation of the artery …’ (Yeats, Mythologies, p. 361, quoted by Kathleen Raine in Yeats, the Tarot and the Golden Dawn, p. 74). Yeats understands the ‘inflow’ as finding man on a ‘winding path’ which is stimulated, as Raine suggests, by ‘the Daimon [which] travels in the lightning-flash of inspiration.’ (Here, ‘daimon’ is used in the Socratic way of being a divine or numinous inspiring force.) The inspiration can be uncomfortable and jolting, hence, Orlik’s pointing spiky ‘fingers’.

Orlik wrote of his painting: ‘The representational depiction of the outward form [is] combined with the invisible but more important inner life. The materialist culture denies the existence of the invisible even though the inner is all there is, the outer is a garment, a mask.’ (Henry Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994). For Orlik Reality is the true reality, not the everyday world that we take for reality, but the world of ultimate Reality which exists beyond our physical world and which is manifested in our physical world. It is the world of Plato’s Theory of Forms, of perfect, abstract entities and it is the world of Hinduism’s Brahman – the eternal Real perfection of the cosmos and the highest universal principle.

In this way, the meandering rivers may be viewed as the major religions (or paths of life) which interact, connect and influence each other throughout history and which have pivotal points of intersection and divergence but which all stem from the same eternal root. Along the way, they are jolted by the lightning bolts above which represent the moment of inspiration that sets them on a different path. Similarly, in a microcosmic world, they are the journeys of an individual life or lives who ‘seek to discover a direction and purpose in the natural unfolding of things.’ (Henry Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994).