One Stormy Day and a Whiskey Chaser, Lake Garda is an original oil painting on canvas measuring 100 x 100 cm by Victoria Horkan. A dark surround of near-black umber and deep bottle green presses in from the edges, so the eye is pulled towards a vertical column of turquoise, teal and pale ice blue at the centre, like a shaft of light or water. Above and to the right, dense petals of vermilion, coral, rose pink and burnt sienna crowd together in thick curls of paint, while along the lower half cobalt, ultramarine and viridian break into smaller fragments that read as reflections across the surface. The handling shifts from scraped, translucent passages in the central veil to heavily loaded palette knife work in the surrounding colour, where ridges of paint catch light like wet stone.

Horkan painted this from a storm she witnessed on a holiday at Lake Garda, facing it directly despite a deep-seated fear of water. The title does two things at once: "One Stormy Day" is documentary, placing the work in a specific lived moment rather than a generalised mood, and "a Whiskey Chaser" introduces the human note that the title itself carries, though the painting's real subject is the storm as an encounter with fear. The central pale column reads as the vivid, radiant light of lightning cutting through the chaos, and the whole composition is built around that contrast between the dark turbulent surround and the illuminated centre. The tension in the piece comes from that pairing: an old fear of deep water held and faced rather than fled, so fear and beauty, darkness and light, exist in the painting together.

One Stormy Day and a Whiskey Chaser, Lake Garda is a unique, one-of-one large-format oil painting on canvas by Victoria Horkan, 100 x 100 cm, available through Eclectic Gallery in Fitzrovia, London. To enquire or arrange a private viewing, contact the gallery.