Peter Howson – Inside Art

Peter Howson’s powerful figuration work has made him one of the foremost British artists of his generation.
His heroic portrayals of the dossers and down-and-outs, misfits and hard men of his home town in Glasgow may have polarised political opinion, but they nevertheless caught the public and media imagination sufficiently to make him a celebrity in his own right; his paintings were bought by the world’s leading galleries and collected by a starry list of private clients, including Madonna and David Bowie. The first video is of a painting entitled ‘Stamp’ Commissioned by the Royal Mail, as an image for a first class stamp to commemorate the Science of steam. This canvas took Peter only a week to paint at his studio in Brixton. The second film is a time-lapse of the painting ‘Hope and Sufferance’. Peter starts with a solitary figure. After a series of smaller adjustments he repaints the entire canvas with a mass of smaller figures. These in turn give way first to a structure then a heroic collection of rouges and street kids.
It seems impossible that anyone could paint with such confidence while making complete changes to the composition of the painting. This process is constantly seen throughout the video in pursuit of the final image, but peter does this quite happily.
The painting took three months to complete, in the winter of 1998 in peters studio in Brixton, London
These time-lapse films were taken by Charlie Paul for insideart and Post was by DazPix. Flame was used to stabilise the time-lapse footage, grade and retouch the images and timewarp parts of the film to keep the images playing at a smooth pace.

Client: Charlie Paul / Inside Art