The Prey is an original oil painting on canvas measuring 100 x 100 cm by Victoria Horkan. Near-black shadow presses in from all four edges, so dense it reads as solid ground rather than atmosphere, and at the centre a rounded arch of colour opens like a cave mouth or grotto lit from within. The upper ring of that arch is the densest part of the canvas: crimson, coral, fuchsia, rose pink, gold and olive packed into thick, curled marks that crowd together and spill inward, trailing loose strokes downward on both sides. Inside the arch, the colour thins to a pale gold-green glow, scraped and luminous, with teal and cobalt pooling in horizontal strokes across the lower passage that read unmistakably as water. The eye enters through the top and is pulled steadily toward that pale interior light.

The title changes the experience of looking. The most luminous point in the painting sits at the centre of a dark surround, framed and spotlit, and the composition is built to draw the viewer towards it. Read with the word "Prey" in mind, the beauty becomes a lure and the arch becomes a maw: what seems like a way through is also a way in from which there may be no return. The painting was inspired by Horkan's travels to Sicily and the formidable presence of Mount Etna, and that origin gives the cave its particular weight: this is not an imagined darkness but one drawn from the real force of volcanic landscape. The painting holds that duality between spectacle and danger, between being drawn to something and being taken by it.

Horkan builds the surface in heavy impasto, massing the surrounding colour into ridged, sculptural relief with a palette knife while keeping the central passage thin and scraped, so light reads as actual glow against physical weight.

The Prey 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.