Candy Woods is an oil on canvas measuring 100 × 150 cm by Victoria Horkan, the largest work in this group and the most enveloping. Two tall banks of colour rise on the left and right like walls of woodland in hot pink, coral, red and orange against deep green and teal, while a soft misted clearing opens between them and recedes into pale cream light, with a pool gathering along the lower edge. The eye moves into the painting rather than across it, drawn down the opening towards the soft light at the centre.

The title is also a description of what the paint is doing. Vivid colour in thick vertical drips runs down the flowering banks as though a confection left in the warmth were beginning to melt and flow, so the wood feels at once natural and fantastical, closer to the enchanted forests of story than to any observed landscape. Horkan has described this as a dreamlike, magical wood, and the misted clearing works as its threshold, a benign opening that invites you in where her darker cave paintings close around the viewer and press inward.

The surface is built in sculptural impasto, curled palette knife marks climbing the sides in stalk like strokes while the central clearing is kept thin and hazed. That contrast between the encrusted, dripping banks and the soft empty middle is what creates the depth, and what makes the painting feel both lush and a little unreal.

Candy Woods is an original oil on canvas measuring 100 × 150 cm by Victoria Horkan. This work has been sold. To enquire about similar available works by Victoria Horkan, contact Eclectic Gallery in Fitzrovia, London.