These texts are extracts from a recently published book about Peter Howson by Robert Heller (Momentum 2003).
To order a copy of the book please contact Flowers East.

Beginnings

Howson has been committed to art since four years after his birth in Isleworth, West London. Very single-minded, he would lock himself away in a small room at the top of the house and make pictures, 'really happy in my own little world'. As he grew older, Howson discovered Picasso and Cubism, got interested in Salvador Dali and Surrealism, started to study Old Masters like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. 'I used to get a real buzz from just looking at paintings'. That buzz has never stopped. 'My mind is very visual', says Howson. 'I mean, I imagine things. When I'm actually talking to someone I'm thinking about something. My brain builds another picture'. There's an obvious connection between this powerful visual faculty and Howson's later custom of working from the imagination rather than from life.

Religious themes

Many of Howson's mature works are deeply influenced by apocalyptic thoughts and biblical references. Howson has never forgotten that 'real buzz' he got as a child, and admits that he still derives many ideas from the Bible. In latter years, he has turned to religion with increasing need and faith.

One of the earliest works is a small picture which shows Christ on the Cross. The cross automatically gives the painting a powerful composition, but the very young artist makes the most of the icon. Crudely but accurately painted, with the livid flesh set off by a red loincloth, the agonized Christ is surrounded by swirling dark paint that seems to echo His agony. The shadow of the crucified figure at bottom left is an inspired and startling touch. By chance or design (or both) this painting far transcends childishness.

The Crucifixion which Howson drew at the end of 2002, as part of his Stations of the Cross project, amply proves the point. The juvenile work is connected to the mature composition by a slender but unbreakable thread, compounded, not of technique, but of deep feeling and the ability to convert that depth of sentiment into a very direct and compelling statement. In both the child's and the adult's hands, the weight of the suffering Christ can be felt - dominating the later work despite the human and unearthly beings that fill the small area of the drawing.

Boxers

Howson was invited to be artist in residence at St. Andrew's University in 1985 and that's when his most familiar and famous painted image was born: the boxer. The boxer, in all his many shapes and forms, is more surreal than real, a creature as short on intelligence as he is over-endowed with gigantic, distorted muscles. This man, you feel, has lost more fights (and badly) than he has won. Yet some underlying heroic drive will take him into the ring again and again. Howson's choice of the boxer to personify this timeless struggle has resonance in his own career and personality. He contends with his personal demons, but returns to the ring with head unbowed, determined to achieve his artistic destiny - whatever that may be. Howson's aggressive, bold style and forceful, exaggerated subject matter had achieved the rare, seductive combination of popularity and artistic excellence.

Between New Image Glasgow in 1985 and his retrospective at the McLellan Galleries in 1993, Howson showed at 20 solo exhibitions, half of them under the Angela Flowers Gallery auspices, and the others ranging from Chicago and Middlesborough to Madrid and Los Angeles. Group exhibitions - 50 of them - took his work to Japan, several American cities, Bulgaria, plenty of provincial British venues, and so on. Prodigious output was required to feed all these exhibitions, and 'prodigious' certainly fits, not just the quantity of work, but the quality, the scale of ambition, and the seemingly inexhaustible vigour of the visual ideas and technical departures that flowed from Howson's creative energy.

From 1986 to 1988, when he turned 30, this young artist found his voice in dramatic group paintings like The Final Parade, in massively solid portraits like Cow Shed Blues, in the first appearances of The Heroic Dosser, a celebration of the common man that Howson has repeated in one form or another ever since. Often the combination and contrast of virtue and vice, love and hatred, the pastoral and the horrible occur in the same canvas. Howson himself has pointed to the way the middle section of The Scottish Trilogy 'brings together greed and drunkenness with the beauty of the moth [a death's head, of course] and the serene Scottish sky'.

The mob unleashed, and the individual converted by mob-membership from human to beast, is a theme to which Howson has returned again and again, along with other recurrent images, such as the frightening, stupid patriots and the has-been no-hopers who refuse to give up hope. Among the latter, the title of a gigantic boxer is especially eloquent: Someone Up There Liked Me. It was painted in 1989, just after the artist turned 30. Its brooding, monochromatic, hulking intensity leaves no doubts as to the artist's own intense feelings; nor does the work leave any doubt over his mounting achievement. The precocity has matured prodigiously.

Bosnia

As it had during the Gulf War, the Imperial War Museum planned to send a 'war artist' to cover the conflict: The Times newspaper sponsored the appointment, and Howson was selected. The Bosnian opportunity came at a crunch moment. 'If I hadn't gone to Bosnia, my career would have gone down the pan'.

The most striking change in the subsequent work, and no doubt in the man, is founded on the gap between imagination and reality. Even the best paintings of the pre-Bosnian period are products of the intellect rather than the eye. A scene like that in Age of Apathy, for example, is a dream sequence. Everything, from the gesticulating, musclebound men in their awful baseball caps to the richly fleshed female, hardly covered by her shift, is dredged from the imagination. The painting is a nightmare, revolving round the three figures staked out on crosses. Bosnia was nightmarish, but no dream: the crosses were real: and Howson's impressive body of Bosnian work is deeply imbued with other realities - nightmares made flesh.

As Howson perceptively observes, there's a dilemma or irony in war, in that it produces some great art. 'Bosnia was one of the most brutal wars this century', almost medieval in the absoluteness of the hatreds involved. Howson caught this well in small portraits like that of an evil-looking checkpoint guard, but perhaps best in a very large oil (Croatian and Muslim) of a horrific rape.

When the Tate Gallery bought Plum Grove , with its central image of an executed, castrated soldier (and children playing nearby), it sealed the importance of the War Museum's exhibition in Howson's development.

Women of America


In 2001 Howson painted four large and important canvases, one of them The Third Step, and the others Judas, Women of America and Crusader - the last two being specifically anti-war, painted directly after 9/11. Despite the strength of his anti-war feelings, Howson found Women of America 'a joy to paint, inspired by seeing socialites in New York wearing Stars and Stripes clothing'. Always an enemy of the violence he portrays so grimly, Howson has moved on from football louts to equally paranoid, middle-class patriots. This is plainly the target area of Women of America, which he describes as 'loosely based on the American paranoia and fear of attack from within their own country'. In Crusader, the single male crusader is a hideous and hideously distorted figure, bulging with muscular flesh. The painting shows signs of the speed with which it was executed, but the rapid brushwork and violent imagery only convey the artist's strong emotions with greater force.

The paradox of art that portrays violence is that the art is itself violent. Thus hatred of war, when it becomes a motif, works along the borders of fascination with war. What makes the war photographer, for example, seek out death and destruction? Why, to come down to specifics, has Howson, when away from the Balkan battlefields, returned so often to mob violence, hooligans, pugilists, gangs, and murder? The answer seems to lie in the same psychological compulsion that leads Howson to exaggerate the human body, depicting the larger-than-life limbs and giant muscles that are associated with physical violence. The dark side of the human psyche is never far from the artist's preoccupations.

Ayr Exhibition


The crowds in Ayr set new records, with 14,000 people piling into the Howson's show - not altogether surprising, in view of the huge publicity surrounding the nude portraits of Madonna. They had not been taken from life: Madonna, who admires and collects Howson's work, was recreated from memory and imagination. But Howson had once again shown his knack for attracting sensational publicity with sensational paintings.

The Ayr catalogue contains two portraits. One is the painting of Steven Berkoff, instantly recognizable, despite the exaggerated musculature of the face (and a jersey collar several sizes too big). The background is pure Howsonian Sturm und Drang: looming clouds, tall and sightless buildings. A very moody picture, it is still naturalistic, while one of Madonna is anything but. A giantess, the singer tramples across a graveyard in front of a church, her absurdly muscled nude body in an ungainly squat, and one distorted hand looking like a set of knuckledusters. Only her head and blonde hair are beautiful, but it is the beauty of a triumphal goddess.

Influences

Howson is hard to place in the current British art scene, where his taste for the heroic, the poignant and the violent is not widely shared. Taking the longer view, he still remains a difficult fit. Sources and masters can easily be found for the apocalyptic paintings, the series, the caricatures, the narratives, and so on.

Asked to name these major influences on his art, Howson reels off a list so long and comprehensive that it fully bears out his statement that 'I love looking at paintings, so there are very many artists who influence me'. The foundations of his art, not surprisingly, were laid in the Italian Renaissance. He specifies four of the supreme giants: Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Giotto. It's also Albrecht Durer's marvellous explorations of apocalyptic themes; Hieronymous Bosch's grotesque fantasies; the massive, heart-rending power of Grunewald (Matthis der Mahler); the vital humanity of Breughel the Elder: all four, in subject matter and in their freedom of figurative technique, have fed Howson's own imagination. They lead inexorably towards the main later Northern influences - the German Expressionists. From this brilliant school Howson derived the sometimes lurid vigour which marks all his work.
Among Howson's British influences, only William Blake, the most visionary of them all, shares the sense of drama, fantasy and religious emotion, whilst the landscapes of Constable and Turner, perhaps the greatest British painter, have inspired Howson with the consummate artistic ability that turns external observation into deep interior feeling.

Drawing

Howson's drawings fall into two broad categories. The first are based on direct observation of nature, predominantly drawings of the model from life, male and female. 'Many people think of me as just a male-oriented artist', observes Howson, 'but I do many life drawings of female models as well'. Generally, he works at great speed: the fastest drawings can take five minutes - or even less: 'sometimes they last half an hour and occasionally they can go into hours and even days, building up the drawing'.

The second category consists of drawings that stem purely from memory and imagination. For Howson, this recreation of reality from the mind alone marks the difference between an academic artist and a true one. 'Probably 90% or even more of artists are academic and can't really use their imagination...They maybe have the technique, but they don't have the vision...You can be the most brilliant draughtsman, but if you don't have a vision or an imagination, then it's useless'. Equally, 'you may have all the vision in the world, but if you can't draw, it's totally useless as well'.