Artist Victoria Horkan renowned for instigating a new movement in the art domain,  shows her unique take on nature through a vibrant and expressive series of paintings.

Victoria Horkan’s work offers a bold and expressive milieu of forms and colours that falls somewhere between the realms of impressionism, abstraction and expressionism. Taking inspiration from the natural world, her paintings make reference to the creatures form the sky and sea. Her work is by no means representational and alludes to subjects such as birds, and butterflies by offering a mere suggestion of their forms and distorting what we know to be true of reality. She playfully engages with scale and perspective, her intention to make you gasp by the expanse of the paintings and move you with her central focus on colour, gesture and mark making. Pure bright colours that is set in contrast with dark and light, warm and cold are combined with loose, distinct brushstrokes that resonate strongly with the expressionist tradition. These strong confident beautiful marks are the sign of an assured and mature artist and the manner in which they are applied creates a sense of movement giving her work and energetic, flickering quality which is particularly evident in her underwater  scenes. Horkan is indeed fascinated by the idea of transcribing sensation and used to sit in the dance studios at her Bretton Hall College in order to try and capture the dancers movements through sketching.

Horkan is aware of what a powerful stimulus colours can be and recognises it’s capacity to affect mood and to generate particular emotions. She strives to make good use of this in her art and believing that painting should be able to move the viewer in much the same way that music may move the listener. In her new collection showing at 67 Yorkstreet Gallery her work very much plays on this idea. Each painting is created by listening to the same piece of music over and over again. In a similar way that Monet painted the ‘Haystacks’ for instance at different parts of the day to see how the light changed the subject matter, Horkan has taken this notion through the medium of  music to see how each piece affects her mood whilst painting and the colours that came to her whilst listening to some of her favourite music.

Having already exhibited in London, Hong Kong, Belfast and Edinburgh and with clients in America, Italy, Miami, Dubai and Abu Dhabi Victoria Horkan is definitely a name to watch!