Specimen B is an original oil and mixed media painting on canvas measuring 100 x 100 cm by Victoria Horkan. The square canvas is dominated by a swirling field of teal and aquamarine, worked in broad, circular sweeps of oil that carry the restless quality of water in motion. Across this ground, collaged butterfly forms gather into four loose clusters: upper left, upper right, lower centre, and lower right, arranged along a diagonal that draws the eye from corner to corner. The butterflies themselves are dense and varied, swallowtails in pale lemon yellow and black, monarchs in burnt amber and dark brown, owl-eye species with intricate spotted wing patterns, and painted petals of hot pink and crimson interspersed between them. Up close the clusters reveal their construction, photographic butterfly images cut and layered onto the painted surface, their edges catching the light differently to the oil around them.

The title places the painting in the language of natural history rather than fine art, and the collision is deliberate. A specimen is something caught, pinned and catalogued, fixed at the moment of its capture for study. But these butterflies are not pinned: they drift in loose formations across open water, grouped as if in mid-migration, and the clusters read as togetherness rather than taxonomy. "B" implies a series, a second subject in a sequence of observations, which gives the work a quietly scientific framing even as the image refuses stillness. Horkan has spoken of this body of work as engaging with evolution and adaptation, how living things change to survive a shifting world, and the gap between the clinical title and the vivid, living mass on the canvas is where that tension lives.

The method carries the idea through to the surface itself. Horkan collages cut photographic butterfly imagery directly onto the canvas and then works palette-knife oil into and around it, so that some wings are real printed images and others dissolve into paint, and the boundary between the two is deliberately blurred.

Specimen B is a unique, one-of-one original oil and mixed media 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.