Poppy’s Swim is an original oil painting on canvas measuring 100 x 100 cm by Victoria Horkan. The composition is built around a horizontal stretch of water that runs through the centre of the square, reflecting sweeps of soft turquoise, pale blue and flashes of butter yellow, like sunlight sliding across the surface. Along the lower edge, a band of saturated cadmium red, magenta and rose-pink piles up in thick, broken marks that feel like flowers pressed close to the water, while the upper third of the canvas resolves into looser, softer banks of coral, violet and green, suggesting trees and planting dissolved by heat and distance. The eye rests first on the pale, luminous water, then climbs into the warm, enclosing banks above it.

The title gives the scene its intimacy. This is not simply a generic pond or river but a place attached to a name, "Poppy," which turns the landscape into the memory of a particular swim rather than an anonymous view. The red along the front edge doubles as poppy colour and as the shoreline where a swimmer might step in, echoing itself again in the blurred reflections across the water. The painting sits at the gentlest end of Horkan’s treatment of water: where other works stage storms or caves that pull the viewer inward, here the pull is towards ease, warmth and the simple pleasure of being in the water on a bright day.

Horkan builds the surface in sculptural impasto, massing the flowered banks from thick, curved palette knife marks that rise in low relief, while the water is worked in longer, dragged strokes and softer blends so that it reads as a different substance entirely.

Poppy’s Swim is a unique, one-of-one large-format oil painting on canvas by Victoria Horkan, 100 x 100 cm. This work has been sold. To enquire about similar available works by Victoria Horkan, contact Eclectic Gallery in Fitzrovia, London.