To the abyss and back. The art of Peter Howson

Painter Peter Howson captures personal conflict, toxic masculinity and horrific wars. Alastair Gordon reviews his work. Part of the Problem with Men series.

Alastair Gordon

Alastair Gordon is co-founder of Morphē Arts, a painter and art tutor at Leith School of Art. He works from his studio in London and exhibits across the UK, Europe and the US.

A painting shows a group of refugees waiting behind a barrier across a road, the background is intense yellow.

Barrier Sunset; 1995; oil on canvas; 122 x 183cm.

Flowers Gallery, London; © the artist; photograph Antonio Parente.

“Everybody’s capable of doing wild things,” says artist Peter Howson, scratching his head as he looks pensively over his paintings. He is talking about the events of his youth and how experiences of trauma, addiction and childhood bullying have influenced the way he paints the misfits, non-conformists and the overlooked.

Howson is one of those rare breeds of artist who garners both public adoration and critical acclaim, an achievement celebrated in his recent retrospective at Edinburgh City Art Centre, an ambitious show spanning four floors and four decades of the painter’s career.

I asked curator, David Patterson why Howson’s work continues to draw public interest. “People can see in every brush stroke how he pours his heart and soul into it,” he replies. “A lot of people are commenting on his honesty. He’s brutally honest and speaks what he feels in his heart.”

Howson rose to public attention shortly after his graduation from Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s with a public commission for a series of wall murals for the Feltham Community Association in London. He became known for his visceral depictions of men caught in contradictory states often painted in monumental scale with his particular style of raw, fleshy realism, an approach influenced by his interest in German Expressionism. It was his tutor, Alexander Moffatt who first introduced Howson to the work of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, their brutal exposition of the German bourgeoises clearly making an early impact. From the hulking boxers and football hooligans of his early career to the bullish vulnerability of soldiers currently fighting in the Ukraine war, his characters are rendered with a raw realism, matched only by the brutal honesty of the artist himself.

People misunderstand the meaning: they think that I’m making (those men) into heroes, when it’s not that at all.

Howson was part of a group of male figurative painters known as the New Glasgow Boys, alongside Adrian Wiszniewski, Ken Currie and Steven Campbell, who studied at the Glasgow School of Art at a similar time in the 1980s. Later artists such as Jenny Saville and Alison Watt would continue the Scottish figurative tradition.

It might be easy to misread his early work in particular as a kind of ode to masculine swagger but when Howson speaks of his work it becomes clear his intentions are more to dispel such toxic masculinity. “I was bullied a lot at school,” he reflects. “I felt so emasculated when I was young, I tried to build myself up: I became a bouncer and wanted to exact revenge on my bullies and I joined the army. All these things that are really not me. People misunderstand the meaning: they think that I’m making (those men) into heroes, when it’s not that at all. It’s a contradiction: I’m trying to get power into my work at the same time as taking the mickey. But some of the Bosnian work is my freest.”

In 1993 Howson was appointed as official war artist to the Bosnian conflict where he witnessed first-hand the atrocities of conflict. This work culminated in a solo exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum with some of the most harrowing and empathetic works of his career so far. Barrier Sunset, painted in 1995, shows a line of Bosnian refugees, emaciated and restrained by a blockade that bars entry to safe land. Behind them, a burning sky speaks to the ravages of war.

Howson is an artist who wears his past on his sleeve, speaking openly about his autism, childhood traumas, recovery from addiction and unnerving experiences serving in the army which he describes as “hell on earth”. Rather than dismissing these traumatic experiences, Howson finds way to manifest them in paint, a process that demonstrates profound empathy with his subjects, both villain and victim.

“You’re always walking a tightrope and I always say I’m walking on the edge of the cliff,” says Howson as he reflects on the influence of traumatic memories. “The trick is not to fall off. But you can go to the edge and look over into the abyss and the abyss is frightening.” Howson takes us to the abyss and brings us back again. Like Dante, a key influence on the artist, Howson doesn’t shy away from the more macabre, morbid and sinister subjects of the human experience yet refuses wallow. His recent ink paintings depict the effects of corona virus and atrocities of the war in Ukraine. Rendered with biblical intensity, bodies writhe in a mass of human flesh pulling and straining as in battle or torment.

His faith is as sincere as his painting, neither dogmatic or didactic, worn on his sleeve along with his experiences of trauma and addiction

Unusually in British art, Howson also speaks openly about his faith, having converted to Christianity later in life. Indeed, a whole floor of the exhibition is dedicated to his religious paintings. “There’s a part of me that wants that peace” he says. “It’s why I’m not frightened of the death thing. The real life is yet to come.” Howson acknowledges the unusual nature of his belief, not least in an art world where sincere religious faith is something of a novelty.

“There’s hardly anyone believes these days but I don’t care if I’m wrong anyway because I’ll never know it anyway.” Even his faith is expressed with honest cynicism. “Religion in art is unfashionable,” he says yet Howson seems unfazed by fashions. His faith is as sincere as his painting, neither dogmatic or didactic, worn on his sleeve along with his experiences of trauma and addiction.

Prophecy

2016; oil on canvas; 183.5 x 245cm; private collection; © the artist; photograph Antonio Parente.

A painting of a melee of many people across Christ on the cross.

This exhibition laments the broken nature of our world yet offers glimpses of hope in human empathy, compassion and ultimately in a redemptive God. In this way Howson describes his painting as “a warning of what’s to come”. Howson refuses to be defined by his traumatic past and it seems evident he now sees the world through the lens of his Christianity, a perspective that clearly defines his understanding of human nature, masculinity and redemption. Whilst we might consider Howson a chronicler of our times his painting are more than reportage. He looks into the very soul of humanity, finding hope in the horror, making visible the invisible and giving voice to the unheard.

Review

Art

Culture

17 May 2024

5 min read

Matthew Krishanu: painting childhood

Portraying family, memories and counterpoints.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

a painting shows Bengali celebrants of a Eucharist.

Preaching, Matthew Krishnau, 2018.

Peter Mallet.

The Bough Breaks by Matthew Krishanu at Camden Art Centre has been described as the most significant exhibition of his work to date because, by showing the drawings and works on paper that he calls the generative heartbeat of his work as well as the works for which he is best known, the exhibition is the fullest expression to date of the expansive world of his artistic practice.

His images are primarily personal stories told through layers of memory, imagination, and conversations with the history of painting, in atmospheric, pared-back compositions which focus particularly on his childhood years in Bangladesh growing up with his brother, and their parents who were a British Christian priest and a Bengali theologian.

He speaks of his images in terms of an ‘I-you-them‘ axis. The work he considers his first painting, from 2005, entitled ‘Boy on a Bed’ was originally a scene of an empty room. He recalls that “late in the night before I was going to be exhibiting it, I sketched in this boy with black hair, brown skin, and a little toy car behind him”. He continues, “I knew that was me, and I knew that there was something I wanted to communicate about the inner world of that child”. In 2012, there came another “fundamental shift” in that “I wanted to paint myself and my brother”. With the first ‘Two Boys’ painting, “I remember it felt like worlds had opened up”. He explains that “when you have a single child, you can project ideas of melancholy or loneliness” but “when you have two, they outnumber the single viewer” and “I think the fact that they are clearly brothers and both have brown skin and often a very direct gaze at the viewer, holds a certain power”.

He recalls being in a show called Painting Childhood: From Holbein to Freud where the very last room was of the ‘Two Boys’: “Having gone through room after room of European children, white children, then coming into a room where these two boys weren't othered in any way, but were taking centre stage in the narrative, was hugely important.”

Adults are excised from the ‘Two Boys’ series “because I want the boys to be out on a limb or up on a hill, without parental supervision”. However, within the ‘Mission’ series - paintings of church life in Bangladesh - adults are seen from the perspective of children. As a result, they are in the ‘them’ part of the axis: “I see the adults in the third person. I'm constructing them as in some way other to the child's eye. This brings in the strangeness of performance and ritual, the stiffness of it too, particularly when you're used to being barefoot on the ground in Bangladesh and, suddenly, are meant to sit still and quiet. For me, it was compounded by the fact that I was brown skinned, as was my brother and mother, and my father was white skinned, and he was a priest, and he was a man, and all the power that comes with being a white man in Bangladesh; just the way he is perceived by his congregation, and even strangers on the street.”

He recalls that: At the time I knew that wasn't right and I didn't like the depictions of God as this white man flying around the sky. As a child, you have quite a raw and immediate relationship to life and nature and spirituality and, for me, it was the religious art that was the fundamental barrier to entering the world of the church. Also, the gendering of ‘Our Father’ or Jesus, the ‘only son’. That's why, as a young teen, I decided I didn't want to be confirmed, because I didn't believe in that construction.”

‘For me, that is where my faith is, in love, in the love of family, in all that a baby calls upon us to give it.’

Matthew Krishnau

In a painting like ‘Preaching’, he is exploring what it is to centre, in a congregation of brown adults and children, “the four nuns and my mother preaching with the two female candle holders and have the men on the sides”. So, “It's all about constructing a world which is both a counterpoint to the world of the two boys and nature, but also a counterpoint to the religious hierarchy we see in the church now”. The ‘Holy Family’ series, “which is of Bengali nuns, priests, and bishops” “is a deliberate response to the white depictions of Christ, baby Jesus, and Madonna”.

He notes that: “It's part of my painting mission to offer a counterpoint on the widest possible framing of an ‘I-to-you’ axis of a brown child, which isn't seen through the lens of National Geographic or Comic Relief ‘white saviours’, but is taken and centred as the heart of a human story. And if there's any spiritual message, then it's about that; of love, of the divinity of children and babies, and the divinity of our beautiful world, the ecological world of trees, water, glorious sunsets and sunrises, and all that comes with the human form.”

He thinks that this show has “set up a kind of a world philosophy” for him: “The core, the heart of the show, for me, is family, particularly of my late wife and my daughter. In and amongst the drawings, there are some pictures of our baby, and my late wife holding our baby or, indeed, holding the tree that my daughter is climbing. For me, that is where my faith is, in love, in the love of family, in all that a baby calls upon us to give it. That is the closest thing to divinity. I won't even use the word God because it's too masculine in our language. The closest thing to the divine, I sincerely believe, is in the eyes of children, is in the eyes of babies, particularly.”

He concludes by saying he would love to expand his practice further in the future, noting “a figure that has really resonated in a way I haven't felt before is the Palestinian priest Revd Munther Isaac and his ‘Christ in the rubble’ sermon”. However, his art always “needs to come from a personal connection to something I've conceptually explored; it needs to have that heart first of immediate one-to-one human connection”.

Matthew Krishanu: The Bough Breaks, 26 April - 23 June 2024, Camden Art Centre, London.