For the Australian politician, see Peter Howson (Australian politician).
Peter Howson (born 1958) is a Scottish painter.
Blind Leading the Blind III (Orange Parade), 1991.
Howson was born in London and moved with his family to Prestwick, South Ayrshire, when Peter was aged four. He spent a short time in the Royal Highland Fusiliers but left to study at the Glasgow School of Art in 1979. Alongside contemporaries such as Adrian Wiszniewski, Stephen Campbell and Ken Currie, who also worked in figurative art, they were christened the New Glasgow Boys.
His work has encompassed a number of themes. His early works are typified by very masculine working class men, most famously in The noble dosser (1987). Later he was the official war artist for the Bosnian civil war in 1993. Here he produced some of his most shocking and controversial work detailing the atrocities which were taking place at the time. One painting in particular Croatian and Muslim, detailing a rape created controversy partly because of its explicit subject matter but also because Howson had painted it from the accounts of its victims rather than witnessing it firsthand. Much of his work cast stereotypes on the lower social groups; he portrayed brawls yielding drunken, even physically deformed participants; casting a somewhat unwelcome message through his explicit work, much of which is possibly a consequence of his own experience.
In recent years his work has exhibited a strong religious theme which some say is linked to the treatment of his alcoholism and drug addiction in 2000. He also suffers from Asperger's syndrome.
His work has appeared in other media, with his widest exposure arguably for a British postage stamp he did in 1998 to celebrate engineering achievements for the millennium, which allegedly infuriated The Queen as her head seemed to be appearing out of a chimney. In addition his work has been used on album covers by Live (Throwing Copper), The Beautiful South (Quench) and Jackie Leven (Fairytales for Hardmen).
His work is exhibited in many major collections and is a particular favourite of celebrities such as David Bowie, Sylvester Stallone and Madonna who inspired a number of paintings in 2002.
