‘You have to reach your own personal gutter’: the fall and rise of one of Scotland’s top painters

EDINBURGH, Scotland — Not all Christian artists like being labelled as such, but painter Peter Howson is definitely a Christian artist. Four years ago he says he was saved – physically and spiritually – by an encounter with Jesus. Since then he has poured out paintings with Christian themes at a torrential rate.

His recent conversion was not his first experience of religion. Born into a middle-class family, he grew up in Prestwick, Scotland, worshipping first in the Church of Scotland and later in Baptist churches in Scotland and England.

Criminal fraternity

He showed promise as a painter while still very young but his boyhood years were turbulent. He tried Glasgow School of Art twice, leaving the first time for a brief and disastrous spell in the army. Later he abandoned it a second time, exchanging it for a series of jobs – warehouseman and nightclub bouncer were two – through which he discovered an affinity with the characters of Glasgow’s working class and small-time criminal fraternity.

Meanwhile, he kept painting. In 1985 he both returned to Glasgow School of Art as a part-time tutor and became artist-in-residence at St Andrew’s University. Two years later he began a series of solo exhibitions, first in London, then Scotland, Europe and the United States.

Street life

But the money and fame came at a personal cost. He had been a drinker since he was a teenager and as the opportunities for excess increased, he took each one and, in the process, lost control.

Seduced

“I was seduced by it all – the places, the people, the life. I was moving with a crowd of jet-setters and there were plenty of drugs around, too. Cocaine was my favourite. I preferred alcohol, though. … I wrecked hotel rooms and relationships with friends and lovers without even knowing I’d done it.”

When his sister died, his farewell to her was a drunken one.

“I was just thinking about where I was going to get my next drink and the funeral seemed an inconvenience.”

He had five cars, including a Rolls Royce, he spent £16,000 building a sauna that he never used, and for several years the amount he paid his butler each month enabled this man to support his entire village back home in Ghana.

There are astonishing stories of alcoholic artists – in the broad sense – who maintain their creative output in spite of their drinking. And so it was with Howson. Things got better – and worse – after he was appointed Official British War Artist for Bosnia in 1993. The bleak work that resulted – 300 images for a show at the Imperial War Museum – brought him wider attention but the suffering he witnessed stayed in his mind to haunt him and as a result his drinking got worse.

Biggest mistake

In 1989 he had got married for the second time. His wife Terri tried long and hard to help him but it was to no avail. The decision to go to Bosnia for the second time, he said later, “probably broke up my marriage and giving up my marriage is probably one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made. What I really needed to get me through was my family, yet I couldn’t admit that.”

“I was drinking anything I could get my hands on,” he told The Scotsman. “My favourite was whisky or vodka, but anything would do. I was using cocaine, sleeping tablets, anti-depressants. I used to get drugs sent up in CD covers from London. It used to arrive by post, like getting a hamper from Harrods.”

His daughter, Lucie, was one of many who paid the price of his excesses. By his own admission, he “never paid her any attention”.

Nevertheless, it was she who set him on the road to recovery and redemption. Having arranged with Terri – from whom he was now separated – to have Lucie for the weekend, he took her home and proceeded to drink himself into a coma, neglecting even to give her a meal. The following morning she packed her things and walked out. Her father, still comatose, knew nothing. It was only when she returned, hours later, that he realised the vulnerable 13-year-old, who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, had been wandering around the city alone.

“That was my moment of truth,” he said. “You have to reach your own personal gutter before you ask for help. Anything could have happened to Lucie in those hours and I was too out of it to know or care.”

Having reached the bottom, he undertook a rehabilitation programme at Castle Craig, a special residential hospital in southeast Scotland. It has made a success of the ‘12 Step Programme’, which demands that patients acknowledge the existence of a ‘higher power’, as a way of helping themselves overcome their addictions.

Whilst there, inspired by the writings of the Christian apologist C S Lewis, he began to consider the Christian faith. At a certain point he got down on his hands and knees in desperate prayer.

“I asked for help and Jesus appeared to me when I asked for him. It wasn’t as if he was standing in front of me or as if there were angels or bright lights, but I felt his presence and a sense of tremendous love. I knew I would never drink or take drugs ever again,” he told The Scotsman.

Sickness in the soul

He shows every sign of fulfilling that prophecy. What is more, the conversion, which, he says, took place through further revelations over the next three months, gave birth to a firm Christian belief. This has enabled him to deal with the “sickness in my soul” he has felt since his mid-thirties. He is now 46.

These days his spiritual life – not to mention his art – is fed by the Word of God. His devotion to and enthusiasm for the Bible has been a principal factor in his agreement to support the work of the Scottish Bible Society (see article).

“It is the most beautiful book in the world,” he told The Scotsman. “If we forget about the Bible then we really lose our civilisation. I think society is disintegrating and we need the Bible because we have lost the fundamental difference between right and wrong.”

Shocking

But if anyone imagines his painting may have ‘gone soft’ following his conversion, they are mistaken. There are clear connections to his earlier work that make his religious paintings very powerful: it is quite startling to realise that the hardcases crowding around the man breaking bread in one picture are the disciples and its title is The Last Supper.

He is still producing work at a feverish rate, too: one project he is working on involves producing 100 scenes of the Apocalypse.

“I believe that my function is to bring people in and give them an experience of Christ through art,” he says. “I cannot preach, but maybe through these images… I can enhance the word of the Bible. If I can bring people to Christianity then I will have succeeded.”