Collecting Petals On The Sea is an original oil painting on canvas measuring 100 x 150 cm by Victoria Horkan. The wide horizontal canvas is largely given over to blue-green water, a field of teal, turquoise and deep bottle green that darkens toward the left edge and lightens gently to the right. Across the upper right quadrant a dense band of colour gathers, built from small, curled marks of coral, rose pink, crimson, apricot and touches of lemon, which break away in smaller clusters and single strokes as they move diagonally down toward the centre. The lower strip of the painting is quieter: thinner, dragged strokes of blue and green run horizontally with vertical drips falling through them, so the surface reads as liquid depth rather than solid ground.

This work stages a slow crossing rather than a storm. The title describes an action rather than a place: someone collecting petals from the surface of the sea, tender and impractical in equal measure. "On" rather than "in" keeps everything at the waterline, floating rather than submerged, and the composition follows this precisely. The warm cluster at the upper right feels like petals released into the air and now adrift above the sea, thick where they first appear and gradually thinning into open water. The composition invites the eye to travel from that crowded origin into the near empty blues on the left, holding fullness and space in tension and giving the painting a calm, reflective register. Where other works in the series lean into the drama of waves and weather, this one turns to transience, small vivid forms carried across something vast that will outlast them.

Collecting Petals On The Sea is a unique, one-of-one large-format oil painting on canvas by Victoria Horkan, 100 x 150 cm, available to buy through Eclectic Gallery in Fitzrovia, London. To enquire about this work or to arrange a private viewing, please contact the gallery.