BIO
CR Houghton is a sculptor creating oil paintings on linen, combining abstract, realistic and iconographic images into collaged themes of human agency. The work is meant to provoke an emotional response while teasing the thoughtful mind. Implied actions, both obvious and abstract, suggest novel realities for the viewer, arousing possibilities for fresh engagement with each encounter.
Houghton was born in Springfield, Ohio. Her youth was devoted to drawing from masterworks in her mother's art library, writing original music for performance on acoustic guitar, and cross-country bicycle touring. She developed her midwestern work ethic from years spent in pastures and barns, training and rehabilitating Thoroughbred horses retired from the racetrack.
Houghton's secondary education was completed at Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Undergraduate studies in sculpture at Bauhaus-influenced Columbus College of Art and Design emphasized integration of studio skills and creativity in the wake of post-minimalism. Houghton persued graduate studies in New York City, completing her MFA at Columbia University just as painting was returning to preeminence and the Guerrilla Girls were organizing in the New York market.
She returned to Ohio and married an entrepreneurial environmentalist. Together they built the Constant Springs Farm Studio overlooking the Mad River valley.
CR's post-graduate career has been invested in years of intensive studio practice fully developing a painting style integrated with the spatial sense of a sculptor. Plain air, still life and paper collage were laboratories for her evolving vision. Her oeuvre is organized into several expansive series related thematically and aesthetically, with human agency as the common thread.
She is prolific in the studio, producing oil paintings, prints, gouaches and wall reliefs. Houghton shows and sells her work online, in select opportunities nationally, and to studio visitors who travel to enjoy the rural beauty of west central Ohio. She is currently not represented by third parties.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
First impressions should trigger a visceral response. Color and composition are intended to evoke a spontaneous pleasurable reaction preceding conceptual engagement. The work must sing before posing questions.
Next, the work queries the viewer's perspective. Never purely abstract or completely representational, human agency is always implicit---action and a universe of possible reactions serve as an invitation for the viewer's interaction with the work to ideate unique personal realities. Titles of individual works are arbitrary, freeing the art of incumbent meaning that would prejudice interpretation.
Elements depicted realistically may be literal or iconographic, often invented, serving as building blocks of the viewer's evolving personal narrative.
Every painting begins with a sense of humility before materials---a sculptor's fidelity. Scale is intimate, typically not exceeding 30". The texture of medium weave linen captures light, intensifying color and reflecting an organic materiality. Paint is thin and brushwood direct, eschewing reliance on gestural flourishes or mark-making.
Artist-made linen-covered wooden panels and frames guarantee a consistent aesthetic presentation. Age-old methods for working with the highest quality traditional materials are followed rigorously to ensure longevity.