Jeff Horton is an Arkansas-based abstract painter, architect, and sculptor. Raised in Weston, Missouri, a small farming community outside Kansas City, he grew up in landscapes not unlike the rural Arkansas ones that shape his work now. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Kansas in 1991 and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, continuing to study art while beginning a career in architecture. In 1993 he relocated to Arkansas and established his practice in Little Rock, where he lives and works.

Horton builds his paintings in layers — oil, cold wax medium, oil stick — working vertically with two or three canvases going at once. Each layer answers the one beneath it: he puts down color and then reacts to it with palette knives, squeegees, brushes, and rags, letting some passages recede and pulling others forward, or taking sections away to find the shapes underneath. What he is after is depth — lighter areas opening against darker ones, so a painting does not resolve in a single pass. Holding it together is the pressure between gestural mark and precise architectural line. In recent years the work has extended into sewn canvas: older and unresolved paintings cut apart and pieced back together by machine in contrasting thread.

Horton is represented by Boswell Mourot Fine Art in Little Rock and Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver. His work has been included three times in the Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, most recently the 60th, and was the subject of the 2025 solo exhibition Tensions & Transformations at Boswell Mourot. In 2026 he exhibited in New York in Young Collector's Group Exhibition II at Anita Rogers Gallery and as featured artist at the Carl Hansen & Søn showroom. He and his partner, Jennifer Herron, were artists in residence at the University of Central Arkansas in 2026, working with interior design students on a collaborative project bridging art and architecture. He was the 2021 Artist in Residence at the Rockport Center for the Arts in Rockport, Texas. His work is held in corporate and public collections including Arkansas Heart Hospital, Baptist Health, and the Central Arkansas Library System.