Sirens is an oil on canvas measuring 100 × 100 cm by Victoria Horkan. Across a field of turquoise and blue, the colour gathers into two main formations that face one another across a central sweep of water, one rising on the left and one on the right. Warm reds, pinks, oranges and golds burn at their cores with cooler cobalt and white at the edges, and from each cluster the paint drifts and drags downward so that the forms seem to trail into the sea beneath them.

The title brings Greek myth into the painting. Rather than describing the Sirens as figures, Horkan lets the pair of colour formations carry their presence, two voices that seem to call across the open water between them. The central band of blue becomes the channel a ship would have to cross, a space of risk as well as longing, and the beauty of the colour holds that double pull of attraction and danger that runs through the story.

The surface is worked in rich oil, the siren clusters built from repeated sweeps of a palette knife that pile the paint into small ridges while the water is brushed and blended more thinly behind. In places the paint is allowed to run and drag downward from the warm formations, so the upper colour holds the viewer and the lower drips suggest a slow pull into depth, the tension between lift and descent held in the paint itself.

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