From Scotland Peter Howson can see all the way to Gaza

From Scotland Peter Howson can see all the way to Gaza

The war artist didn't go to the Middle East during the recent conflict. But in his mind he was there, recording the despair

Mike Wade

Wednesday February 11 2009, 12.01am GMT, The Times

Cluster bombs are preoccupying Peter Howson. “I’m obsessed with cluster bombs right now,” he growls. “And this picture - you even have the mosque in there, with the bombs going off all around it.” The artist stands by the window in his study. Behind him, the Ayrshire hills shimmer on a crisp winter’s morning, a beautiful, tranquil prospect. But Howson’s attention is entirely focussed on his work, scattered over the floor, images of desolation that he has pulled from the 20 or so sketchbooks piled on his desk.

Each one is more terrifying than the last. A line drawing of a figure in agonising pain. Children fleeing some unseen horror. A couple embracing - they seem lost in a moment of sexual ecstasy, until you look closer. “It’s actually a dying pregnant woman,” Howson says in his slow, resonant voice.

“Oh Peter, I’ve not seen this one before. That’s beautiful,” cries his fianc?e, Annie McKay, who has her coat on, ready to go out on some errand for him. She is pointing at a Pietà, a figure sorrowfully carrying a broken body. Howson picks it up and places it next to another, a skeleton on its haunches leering out of a pattern of explosions and death. “I have spoken to people who have been in Gaza since the ceasefire,” Howson says gruffly. “It is like the aftermath in an earthquake zone.”

To those who know his work, it is almost logical that Howson should have reached this point, working manically during the recent Israeli invasion to pour out his rage over a war that has cost more than 1,300 lives. For the best part of 30 years he has visited many other scenes of despair, from the dossers of Glasgow recorded in his early work to the corpses of Kosovo, which he conjured up as an official war artist in Bosnia.

Along the way he has endured all sorts of personal nightmares. He has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism sometimes associated with intelligent people, but which often blights their relationships with others. Its influence on him is unknowable, but at different moments, marital breakdown, drug addiction, alcoholism, and religious conversion have overwhelmed his life.

Through all this his prodigious output has rarely diminished, but - even by his own obsessive standards - the period since Christmas was immense. In just a matter of days, hundreds of these Sketches of Gaza appeared, as the artist was swept up in what he calls the “ecstasy” of creativity. His routine is daunting. Rising at three every morning, he prays for half an hour in a tiny chapel beside his rambling Victorian house. Then, inspired by the visions that fill up his mind, he starts sketching again. The aim, eventually, is to create a series of oil paintings and mount a show to rival his Bosnia exhibition, sponsored by The Times, which ran at the Imperial War Museum.

“Images come to me, like you wouldn’t believe,” he says. “I’ve got millions inside my head, it’s like I ask and they come pouring out. I know that the strength, whatever it is, doesn’t come directly from me. It can’t do. It’s like keying into something much more powerful, into the pulse of the Universe in a way. I know it sounds a bit flowery. But it is stunning.”

Howson has made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem in four years and most recently was in the Holy Land in the weeks before the Israeli offensive. There he listened to a Mass that moved him to tears, and met George Sa’adeh, the Christian Deputy Mayor of Bethlehem, whose 12-year-old daughter was shot dead by an Israeli soldier. “He is the most courageous man I’ve met. He wants to forgive, and I don’t know how he can. He was the perfect embodiment of all the people I met over there, of Christianity, of any kind of religion, in action,” he says.

Speaking on the eve of yesterday’s general election in Israel, though, he is pessimistic. It hardly matters who wins, he says, “they are all as bad as each other”, but Binyamin Netanyahu - whose brother Yonatan was killed in the raid on Entebbe in 1976 - has a dark side that Howson fears. “Netanyahu’s brother was a hero, and he himself has become the ultimate anti-Hamas, anti-Palestinian leader. He is likely to get in narrowly, and when he gets in, it will be apocalyptic. ”

Howson’s only embarrassment is that these new images are works of his imagination. He wanted to be in Gaza “at the eye of the storm”. He even talked of being smuggled into the conflict zone, this pale, 6ft 4in former bodybuilder, crawling through a tunnel to get to the other side. He snorts. The image would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.

Howson was born in London in 1948, but moved to Prestwick when he was 4. He started at Glasgow School of Art, but in his first year, signed up for the Army, in which he served for nine months. He hated the experience. When he finally graduated, he emerged in the 1980s alongside Ken Currie and Steven Campbell, his work quickly finding its way into the Tate in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York. His marriage, to Teri, was short-lived, but he has a daughter, 20-year-old Lucie, a blast of energy in the house today, who suffers from Asperger’s and epilepsy.

His early success brought celebrity, drugs and drink. For a while Howson hung out with David Bowie, Bob Geldof and Robbie Coltrane. He was even mates with Madonna, until he disobeyed her wishes and painted her nude; with that, Madge stopped ringing. But Howson was that rare thing, a modern British artist with rock-star appeal before anyone had heard of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. And by the way, he says, their work is elitist rubbish.

By 2000 he believes his addictions had brought him close to death and he checked himself into a clinic. It was there, that he saw the light and felt “this overwhelming sense of peace and love come into my life”. That was the start of his new journey, he says, when he became a Christian. “I’m not saying I turned into a saint, but I am trying to do the right thing. I haven’t betrayed Annie, or anyone.”

But it is a hard God he serves. He keeps a full bottle of Captain Morgan rum by his desk, a reminder of the bad old days, and lets his work emerge between the poles of absolute excess and utter self-denial. Simply finding the middle way appears to require a huge effort. He can be “15 different people”, and for the platoon of friends and helpers who surround him, he is, he admits, a nightmare.

Howson survives only on a rigorous, self-imposed schedule. Sleeping is “a waste of time” and he habitually rises early to sketch in his study and listens to Bach, whose work he “obsessively” collects. At 7am, he is driven to his studio, 30 miles away in Glasgow, where he paints all day, or talks to Frank, the artist and heroin addict who shares his studio space. He travels home on the coast road, to give him time to relax and talk to John, his driver and helper.

And then there’s Annie, who has left the house to let us talk. She is the art teacher who Howson ran into six years ago at a gallery opening at Gourock on the Clyde. For a while they lived in adjoining flats in Glasgow, until Annie found the pile they have been living in for the past 18 months. A tiny photograph of the pair of them is stuck on the wall near the fireplace, and Howson already wears her wedding ring, though they are only engaged to be married.

“We don’t have what you might call a normal relationship,” he says. “We stay in different parts of the house. She takes care of me a lot of the time, I take care of her in some ways. Sometimes we get a bit confused, but not really. I know we are a couple who love each other very much and care for each other. We’re just not a proper couple in that we don’t have a physical relationship.”

We’re way off topic now, Howson complains. His message is clear: “The people who are suffering here are the innocents, that’s what we are saying. The innocents are suffering and Israel cannot get away from that. These aren’t people who want war.” What should he call his exhibition of these Gaza paintings, he wonders. “Unholy Land”? “Samson in Gaza”? “David and Goliath”? Then he pulls himself round to his domestic circumstances again.

He meets Annie in the evenings, he says, for a hour or so, when they sit in front of the television. When their programmes are finished, they go their separate ways to bed.But how can such a passionate man resist a beautiful woman such as Annie? “I love women, I do,” he pleads. “Probably that’s one of my big dangers. I’m a visual person, I love beauty. There’s comes a point in life... Beauty can lead you to God, in the way that Dante was led through Beatrice. You have to sanctify it at some point.”

He moved to this house for Annie, but he misses the city. “But then I don’t really like being anywhere, apart from work. The idea of happiness doesn’t really come into it for me. It’s a different feeling, part of the Asperger’s. I don’t really feel here. It’s like watching the world through a television. Even talking to you is strange.”

www.peterhowson.net