The Coral Singers is an oil on canvas measuring 100 × 100 cm by Victoria Horkan. A deep turquoise field fills the canvas, swept with broad, looping strokes of white and green that carry the sense of water in motion, and two clusters of warm colour sit across it on a diagonal: a brighter bloom of pink, cream and yellow in the upper left, and a denser, hotter mass of orange, red, gold and coral in the lower right, the two formations reading like a call and response sounding across open water. Between them the blue field is largely bare, held as open depth rather than filled in, so the distance between the clusters becomes part of the composition.

The title gives the reef a voice. The coral formations become singers, their colour standing in for song, warm voices carrying across the cold of the ocean, and the diagonal arrangement across the canvas enacts the musical idea literally as two groups separated by water that sound toward one another. 

Horkan builds each cluster from curled palette knife marks piled into reef like relief, so the warm forms stand physically above the surface while the blue sweeps flat and wide around them, and that physical contrast of life raised up and water pulled back becomes the structure the whole painting rests on.

The Coral Singers is an original oil on canvas measuring 100 × 100 cm by Victoria Horkan. This work has been sold. To enquire about similar available works by Victoria Horkan, contact Eclectic Gallery in Fitzrovia, London.