Darkness and light

Published on Saturday 18 November 2006 01:34

THE FIRST RELIGIOUS PAINTING that Peter Howson produced was Christ on the Cross. The small limp figure, one of his first oils, was painted in 1964, when he was six. It was snapped up by his uncle, Bob Smith, making him the earliest patron of the budding Scottish artist.

In 2003 the painter, who turned to Christianity as he struggled to break a drug and alcohol addiction, produced The Stations of the Cross. The set of 14 paintings, dark and intense close-ups of Christ's face on the path to crucifixion, were bought by John Studzinski, a Catholic businessman, to hang in his private chapel.

Early this year Howson once again began to wrestle with religious art. This time his subject was Scotland's patron saint. Edinburgh's City Art Centre had approached him for a single painting of St Andrew, as a contemporary end piece for an exhibition of medieval and renaissance works on the saint."We were looking for a contemporary statement to finish off the show," says curator David Pattison. "I made it clear we didn't have any money to pay him, but I thought the subject matter might be of interest."

It was. Howson made his own trip to the Holy Land, and by the spring had made 40 studies. The art centre, meanwhile, found it had to postpone the wider show. The exhibition now opens on 30 November, St Andrew's Day, and consists entirely of Howson's works - about 80 of them.

When we meet, the tumultuous canvas at the heart of the show sits in the middle of Howson's Glasgow studio. The light in the room, on the top floor of a Victorian former school, reflects so poorly off its dark corners that visitors are invited to climb a stepladder and study it in a mirror. Howson has described it as the hardest painting he's ever done, one he has been altering constantly.

It shows the elderly apostle half-on, half-off the cross while seething bodies crowd around him. Amid a swirling, dark and grimy scene, figures range from the guards throwing the ropes around his arms to the figure of the Roman consul's wife at his feet. St Andrew bought his martyrdom by converting her to Christianity.

The clothes are Biblical in style, but this crucifixion could be taking place in modern Scotland, Edinburgh or Glasgow. There are multi-storey blocks in the distance, a night club with young people pouring out of it to see the spectacle. One executioner sports a Tam O'Shanter. The pro-consul's wife, no Christian virgin, is dressed like a streetwalker, with torn fishnet stockings.

St Andrew is neither quite on, or off the cross. Howson says it may show the moment of legend when, after three days without dying, he was offered, and refused, the chance of life.

A smouldering presence in his studio, passionately embroiled in the painting, Howson seems insecure about his Scottish reputation, even on the heels of a massively successful exhibition in New York. He wants to know what visitors make of his new work, and is hoping an Edinburgh gallery will add the painting to its collection, even at a price that might run to 100,000.

There was a spate of purchases of Howson's work by galleries in the 1980s, after he emerged as one of the New Glasgow Boys. Buyers ranged from the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate in London. Now they mostly buy contemporary Britart.

He is keenly aware that public galleries in Scotland have not bought his work for several years. "Maybe they just think I'm crap," he says, adding, of the new work: "I'm keeping it, definitely, for them to buy. I want something to go in a collection again because no Scottish museum has been interested in a dozen years."

At 48, Howson has a new fiance in teacher Annie McKay. "I'm a Protestant, but I haven't been going to church for a long time," he tells me. "I've been going to Mass because she's Catholic, she's been dragging me along." He doesn't take communion, but worships under his own system. "When you come off drink and drugs there's a hole in your life, you have to fill it with something. Faith is the most important thing for me, and unless you fully understand that faith has nothing to do with proof or rationality you will never understand it."

No matter how many times the likes of Richard Dawkins paint religion as irrational and stupid, people are going to be drawn to it, he says. "It does create tension, and it does create wars, but so does atheism."

There's a touch of embarrassment about religious imagery in Scotland, though not perhaps in the Catholic Church. The Rev John Miller, who for 35 years has overseen Castlemilk East Parish in Glasgow's Castlemilk housing scheme, is a close friend of Howson and has written an introduction for the exhibition's catalogue. Religious leaders have been invited to the exhibition's opening.

"The Scottish Reformation dashed to pieces most of the Scottish religious art that was in cathedrals and churches in the form of paintings, windows and carvings," says Miller. The reformers were driven by their devotion to the words of scripture rather than the images. Tradesmen in Glasgow rallied to protect their cathedral from destruction, but even there the contents were destroyed, and the relics of saints were rubbished. The Puritan tradition distrusted the eye, and it became the word that dominated."

Miller now believes there is a resurgent interest in art, and religious art, helped by television. He helps in a small way, distributing postcards and reproductions of paintings by such artists as Bellini and Velzquez to his parishioners.

Howson says St Andrew would mean more to Scotland if the Reformation hadn't swept away so much. "We have still got that Calvinist hangover from that, this fear of saints and fear of images and fear of paintings." He sees his own work as about 50 per cent religious paintings. "The religious stuff is really the way ahead for me, even though people are divided as to what they think of them, of the idea of religious art. I love it."

ST ANDREW IS A MYSTERIOUS CHAR-acter, because so little is known about him from primary sources. He was the first apostle chosen by Christ, whom he led to his brother Peter, the founder of the Church. But while he is also the patron saint of Russia and Greece, he's a relatively minor figure in the Bible. Much of what we're told about him comes from the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend), a book of saints' lives dating to the mid-13th century. "It's not scriptural, it's legendary," says Miller.

When Howson made his second trip to the Holy Land to research the painting, he hooked up with a Biblical archaeologist, Ray Bruce, an authority on the saint. He visited key locations in St Andrew's story, sometimes with an army escort, and fished on the Sea of Galilee at dawn, as Andrew and Peter would have done.

One place he regrets missing out is Patras in Greece, the supposed site of the crucifixion. "He must have been about 75," Howson says. "If Jesus was crucified around AD33, then Andrew would have been slightly older. He was crucified in AD70, which would have been 40 years later. It's well documented, this date."

One legend has it that several hundred years later, in AD345, St Regulus, the Bishop of Patras, was instructed to remove St Andrew's relics, rather than let them all go to Constantinople. Carrying off a tooth, an arm bone, a kneecap and some fingers, he was eventually shipwrecked at Kilrymont near St Andrews and founded a church. By the 11th or 12th century St Andrews was a place of pilgrimage and in 1160 the new cathedral was begun there. By the time it was completed in 1318, St Andrew was widely looked on as Scotland's patron.

The Reformation destroyed a lot of imagery, but St Andrew's position survived it. The rare 1422 Trinity altar piece in the National Galleries of Scotland, on loan from the Queen, places St Andrew behind King James III of Scotland. In that same century the Saltire started to appear on coinage and on the Scottish flag.

Religious imagery was rare in Victorian and 20th-century Scotland. Howson admires one piece, Christ as the Man of Sorrows, the 1860 work by the Aberdeen painter William Dyce, a Roman Catholic. John Duncan, an early 20th-century Scottish artist, painted an adoration of the Magi, now in a private collection.

Pattison has been watching the development of Howson's painting of St Andrew's crucifixion. The City Art Centre is keen to buy the work, he says, but the likely price could be three times its annual acquisitions budget. "Peter is willing to give us that time to consider it and raise the money. He's given us first option, but he hasn't given us a price." The work, he says, has "got much darker as it's progressed. He did do a couple of pieces of Peter and Andrew, as brothers relating to each other. But Peter's work is about the dark side, it's about the underbelly of society."

• Peter Howson: Andrew - Portrait of a Saint is at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 30 November until 4 March.