Flamingo Chasing, 2023

In 2023, Jeremy Houghton undertook a journey to extend a long-standing engagement with one of the natural world’s most compelling and vulnerable species: the lesser flamingo. His route led him into the vast expanse of the Kalahari Desert, one of the few remaining breeding grounds for these birds. The landscape, expansive and elemental, became less a destination and more a condition through which to look.

Their destination was Baobab Island, a site both remote and resonant, defined as much by its isolation as by its ecological significance. The journey towards it unfolded gradually, the terrain offering little in the way of fixed reference, only scale, horizon and atmosphere.

The intention was simple: to locate the flamingos, and through that encounter, to begin to understand how they might be translated into paint. Houghton stayed at Jack’s Camp, positioned on the edge of the Makgadikgadi pans, from where the desert opens out into a vast, reflective terrain. From there, a helicopter journey extended the act of observation into the air, allowing the landscape to be experienced as a shifting field of colour and form.

Below, the salt pans appeared as expansive, variegated surfaces — mineral deposits forming tonal variations that read almost as abstract compositions. After nearly an hour in flight, a subtle shift occurred on the horizon: a dense, luminous field of pink, gradually resolving into movement. As the helicopter approached, the scale became apparent — thousands of flamingos forming a continuous, living surface, oscillating between pattern and mass. What at first appeared as colour alone revealed itself as structure, rhythm, and motion.

This encounter formed the basis of the Kalahari Collection, a continuation of a body of work that began over two decades earlier. The flamingo, already central to Houghton’s practice, is here reconsidered through a new context — one defined by scale, light and atmosphere. The collection builds upon earlier works, including those exhibited in Think Pink at the Saatchi Gallery, while extending their scope both materially and conceptually.

In some paintings, the introduction of gold leaf operates not as ornament, but as a structural element — a means of registering light, rarity and fragility within the image. The surface becomes both reflective and symbolic, echoing the conditions of the environment itself.

As Houghton notes:
“Flamingos offer infinite possibilities for composition. When I begin, I don’t work towards a fixed outcome. At distance, the flock dissolves into pattern — it becomes less about the individual bird and more about the relationships between colour, rhythm and space.”

The flamingo occupies a long-standing position within visual and literary culture, functioning both as subject and symbol. Its presence in painting has ranged from the exoticised environments of Henri Rousseau to the surreal compositions of Salvador Dalí, where the bird becomes a vehicle for transformation and ambiguity. In literature, too, its form has been used to evoke states of transition and atmosphere — from the lyricism of Pablo Neruda to more contemporary explorations of identity and change.

Within this context, Houghton’s work does not seek to replicate these traditions, but to reposition the flamingo within a contemporary framework. The bird becomes less an object of depiction and more a means through which to explore perception, movement and abstraction.

“There is a rhythm to flamingos,” Houghton reflects. “In the way they stand, in the repetition of movement, in the beating of wings. One collector described them as musical — and that feels accurate. They operate almost like notation across the surface.”

This sense of rhythm informs not only the compositions themselves, but also their titles, many of which draw from music. Works such as Sweet Dreams Are Made of These are not descriptive, but associative — extending the experience of the painting beyond the visual into something more atmospheric and intuitive.

The Kalahari Collection marks both a continuation and a development within Houghton’s practice. It brings together observation and abstraction, experience and translation, grounding the work in a specific encounter while allowing it to move beyond it.

What emerges is not simply a record of place, but a series of images that operate between states — between representation and pattern, between stillness and motion, between what is seen and what is inferred. In this space, the flamingo becomes both subject and structure: a means of exploring how the natural world can be perceived, distilled and reimagined through painting.