The Wishing Tree at Tai Po is an original oil painting on canvas measuring 100 x 100 cm by Victoria Horkan. The square canvas is built on a warm, sandy ground of ochre and pale gold, with cooler notes of soft jade and light teal surfacing around the edges. Across this field, clusters of colours sweep in broad arcs, dense at the upper left and upper right and gathering again along the lower edge, so that the bare ground runs through the middle like a path or trunk. Each cluster is made from short, curled strokes of cadmium red, coral, fuchsia, cobalt and ultramarine, applied so thickly they stand proud of the surface and catch the light, reading as hundreds of tied scraps or petals caught in motion.

The title names a specific place and custom rather than an imagined scene. The Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees at Tai Po in Hong Kong are famous banyans where people write wishes on coloured paper and cast them into the branches, leaving the trees bright with hanging offerings all year. This painting does not describe the tree directly, but the arcs of colour feel like those wishes once they have accumulated, the canopy heavy with hopes thrown upward by many hands. The open band of warm ground through the centre reads as the space beneath the tree where people stand and look up, so the work becomes less a landscape and more a picture of shared hope suspended in the air.

The surface is built in Horkan’s sculptural impasto. She works thick, undiluted oil with a palette knife into repeated, swirling marks, piling the clusters into a raised relief that catches and holds light, while the sandy ground behind them stays thinner and more scraped, allowing the colour beneath to glow.

The Wishing Tree at Tai Po is a unique, one-of-one original oil painting on canvas by Victoria Horkan, 100 x 100 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.