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.

Dizzy Heights – Oil on Canvas – by Jeremy Houghton

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.

In 2009, Houghton was commissioned to paint HM The Queen presenting a new riband to Her Majesty’s Gentlemen at Arms on the occasion of their Quincentenary, and his reputation as a collected artist gathered prominence. Following a solo exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery London in 2010, his international reputation was established and exhibitions at the Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg, RSA, and The Visual Arts Gallery, Delhi, India, followed in 2011 and 2012. His skill in depicting movement and light led to his selection as one of the Official BT Olympic Artists for London 2012. In the same year, Houghton received an award from the Society of Equestrian Artists for ‘Best Sporting Artist’.

In 2013, Houghton was invited to become Artist in Residence at Highgrove, the Royal estate of HRH The Prince of Wales, resulting in an exhibition ‘A Portrait of Highgrove’. This series of monochromatic watercolours ‘truly capture the spirit of Highgrove and the Home Farm' showing how farming communities adapt year in and year out to work in harmony with nature. In the summer of 2013, Houghton became Tour Artist for the Aston Martin Centenary Tour of Europe, where he drove with the Tour during the day and painted each night. These Aston Martin watercolours are now in private collections around the world.

Mid-career

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.

In November 2014 Jeremy Houghton was interviewed at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge as part of the In Conversation with the Master series. The conversation and subsequent Q&As was titled The Alchemy of Loss and Gain. The Masters in Conversation series has also featured Ahmed Rashid amongst others.

During 2015 Jeremy Houghton received another Royal appointment by becoming artist-in-residence at HM The Queen's Windsor Castle estate. His access to events behind its closed doors led to a series of paintings that captured the heartbeat of life inside the castle, the stables and the mews. As a source for artistic expression, the theme of witnessing an unfolding of international events alongside the momentary scenes of daily life continued to evolve at Goodwood House where he became artist-in-resident for Lord March. In recording life in the house, on the farm, in the gardens, forests and surrounding countryside, Houghton created a collection of art works that captured the atmosphere and essence of a place in which a working community mingles with contemporary and historical artefacts and events of cultural and sporting significance.

In addition to these official residencies, and evolving during the same period, Jeremy Houghton created the large-scale rural art installation Glassground. The work in progress relates to his many experiences as an artist in residence in that its arrangement of earth, water and architectural structure draws on similar themes of space, light and movement. In Glassground, a heightened sense of the liminal spaces we often encounter is conveyed through the diffusion of light and shadow on natural and man-made surfaces, and natural effects such as reflection. Glassground invites visitors into a contemplative, observant, and sensory relationship with a transparent building and its situation in nature; the experience is not unlike that of Houghton's as an artist in residence . Amidst shifting conditions, multiple viewpoints and contrasting terrain, visitors become aware of the subjective processes through which they engage with the external world, with rural buildings and places; how they move between external and internal spaces, and how they remember such journeys and places.

In December 2015, Jeremy Houghton was appointed artist-in-residence for Land Rover Ben Ainslie Racing. Through this role, and in gathering experiences and images from the team's home in Portsmouth and attending the America's Cup World Series events, he will make art works that capture life off the boat as well as on it; observing the designers and builders – the team effort that goes into creating an internationally competitive sailing boat. His remit is to make art works that open up the sport of sailing to a wider audience, especially young people from different backgrounds, demonstrating that the sport is as much about innovative design and technology as it is about the visceral excitement and challenge of competitive sailing.