The Player Green is mixed media painting on canvas measuring 100 × 100 cm by Victoria Horkan. Across a deep emerald ground, butterflies gather into a loose ring that circles an open field of luminous green, the clusters densest across the top and lower edge and more scattered along the right. Within and around them, strokes of turquoise, pale blue and white are brushed and swirled through the ground, so that the colour seems to move under and between the wings, and the eye travels around the circling forms rather than straight across the canvas.

Green sets the climate of the painting, closer to a meadow or forest clearing than to open water, and the butterflies read as players inside that living space. Their colours run warm against the ground, cream, yellow, coral, red and brown with flashes of blue near the lower edge, and the title suggests both the idea of play and the sense of nature as an active presence rather than a backdrop. Similar to the rest of the paintings in the butterfly series, the gathering of wings feels like a game or a dance that loops back on itself, a formation held just at the point of turning.

Horkan fuses collage and paint, setting cut photographic butterfly wings directly among thick strokes of colour so that real wings and painted ones sit side by side and blur into one another, while the green ground is brushed in thinner layers that keep a sense of motion behind them. The wings stand slightly forward from the surface, poised between the precision of a specimen and the looseness of a gesture, the collage giving exact pattern and the paint giving life.

The Player Green 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.