b. 1958
Born in London, Peter Howson moved to Scotland at a young age and went on to study at Glasgow School of Art. Under the tuition of Sandy Moffat, Howson pursued his artistic career and developed his recognisable style of figurative painting. Howson’s early works are typified his cast of overtly masculine, working class men. In 1992 he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to record the conflict in the former Yugoslavia . He was appointed official British war artist for Bosnia in 1993. The artist’s unflinching approach to depicting the human condition generated some of his most well-known and controversial works. Later paintings have taken a more religious narrative; Howson grew up in a religious family and returned to Christianity after battles with substance abuse. Howson’s work spans a range of human emotion from suffering and brutality, to the everyday heroism of the working man and the power of spirituality.