ThirstyFish

Artist: David Guinn, 2010


Please read the two posts introducing the Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program and The Mural Mile before you follow the photo tour. You can also begin the tour with the First Mural.

In this mural, the neighborhood around the mural site is incorporated into the mural. The blue door to the left represents a Portal into the world that we see (or would like to see) around us. Irrespective of the season or the time, the Portal symbolically connects you to back to where you stand, but to a period when the Garden of Delight flourishes.

The Mural might also be a play on the early 15th Century panel painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by the Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, in which the exterior of the panel doors depict the Creation of the world while the three panels inside symbolize Eden, Earth and Hell.

Many artists as well as science fiction and fantasy writers have been intrigued by the concept of Portals - Doors or Wormholes that instantaneously connect to another place, time, dimension or universe. The notions of magical or technological Portals are used in film, television, games and literature. Although there has been no observational evidence of wormholes, their existence is implied in some equations of Theoretical Physics.

You might also enjoy reading about Novikov self-consistency conjecture which hypothesizes that time travel paradoxes are impossible. The movie "12 Monkeys" obeys Novikov's conjecture.