Jeremy Houghton
Jeremy Houghton, (born 13 June 1974) is an English painter. Using either oils or watercolour, Houghton focuses on capturing movement, producing representations of subjects including migrating birds, high-energy sports, rural life, equestrian pursuits and the military. Houghton's career to date has been structured by a mixture of studio-based work and documentary residencies: commissions that depict the life of communities from Olympic athletes to people working for the British royal family.
Although Houghton's focus ranges quite widely, his technique remains a constant. Regardless of subject, he always deploys areas of unpainted paper or canvas, using them to explore both the 'spaces between things' and the representational territory between figuration and abstraction.
Early Life and Career
Houghton was born and brought up in Broadway, Worcestershire, where he still lives and works today. (Sited in a famously beautiful area, Broadway is well known as the Cotswolds village where a number of leading cultural figures stayed and were inspired in the late 19th and early 20th century, including Oscar Wilde, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, William Morris and Edward Elgar.)
After finishing school, Houghton studied at Exeter University, graduating with a degree in Law in 1996. Having continued to paint throughout his time as an undergraduate and, later, alongside a series of teaching jobs in schools, he went on to study fine art at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and then at Aix-Marseille University, France. Houghton left his studies in Marseille to take up a job as Head of Art at the International School of Cape Town. He combined teaching at the school with travel in Africa (including a residency at Rorke's Drift, the famous former mission station in KwaZulu-Natal) and continuing to paint and draw until 2004, when he returned to the UK with the intention of developing a full-time career as an artist.
Next steps
After leaving South Africa, Houghton won a series of commissions that cemented his reputation for producing representations of iconic subjects. The most significant of these was in 2009 when he was asked by the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms (the monarch's ceremonial guardsmen) to paint a portrait of the Queen presenting the officers with a new riband. In 2010, 'Think Pink', a solo exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery featuring oils of migrating flamingos, helped develop Houghton's reputation internationally, and in 2012 he was invited to show at Everard Read, Johannesburg and at the Visual Arts Gallery, Delhi.
Houghton's skills led to his selection as one of the twelve artists asked to help document the efforts of British athletes in the build up to the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games. In the same year, he received both the 'Best in Show' and 'Best Sporting Picture' award from the Society of Equestrian Artists.
Recent work
More recently, Houghton has consolidated his reputation as a residency artist with a series of high-profile commissions. In 2013 he was asked to capture the life of Highgrove House, the royal residence of the Prince of Wales in Gloucestershire, UK. Houghton chose to focus here on the estate's working farm and gardens, which support the Prince's interest in the preservation of both traditional agricultural techniques and indigenous plant and animal species. The following year, Houghton was invited to complete a similar project at Windsor Castle for the Queen, where he concentrated on documenting the everyday life of the working stables that sit at the heart of the castle complex.
In August 2014, the Ashmolean Museum, Broadway staged a ten year retrospective of his paintings in its new contemporary art space. The exhibition's hard-backed catalogue featured an essay by Dr. Jim Brook, who wrote
- by emphasizing the dynamic forces of motion and light, he [Houghton] invites us to speculate upon the condition of looking, our changing perception of reality, the different ways in which we represent the visual world, and how the compulsion to represent shapes our grasp of reality.
- In Houghton’s paintings, the image substantiates the ebb and flow of the artist’s processes; a transformation which he utilizes to reflect upon his observations and experiences of daily life and human activity. The different contexts of work, sport and war foreground his perception of the specific human gestures and actions which disclose them. If the disappearance of the moment is common to all these theatres of life, so is the idea of completion, not only of an event, but of every action towards its end. Similarly, Houghton’s paintings describe images of closure, but this fixed moment is also traceable to the motion of the hand and brush, and the formulations of paint and surface that individuate them.
Additional projects
Alongside his residencies and studio work, Houghton has been working on the construction of a large-scale rural art installation titled Glassground. Informed by work done for his MA by Research in Fine Art (University of Gloucestershire; awarded 2017), this project has turned the floor of a derelict agricultural greenhouse into a water-filled pool. The idea is that the water helps transform the building into an environment that both confuses and extends the viewer's response to light, reflection and liminal space.