Monthly column on the arts

In 1970 Angela Flowers founded a London gallery that was to become one of the leading showcases for British art. It launched many younger artists, promoted the work of established names, and in due course expanded into America.

Last month Flowers East, on the edge of East London, devoted its superb space to an exhibition by Peter Howson. At 43 one of Scotland's best-known contemporary painters, he commands six-figure prices and is collected by the likes of Madonna, Sylvester Stallone and David Bowie.

He has been an alcoholic for many years. After working in Bosnia as the official UK war artist, it was to alcohol he turned for help when images of the war returned in horrendous flashbacks. In 2001 he was admitted to a rehabilitation clinic with alcohol addiction and drug abuse.

There he came across the writings of C.S. Lewis, a major factor in a journey that was to lead him to Christianity and the Church of Scotland. In that journey he was helped by Peter White, minister of Sandyford Henderson Memorial Church, Glasgow, where Howson now regularly worships. His faith is straightforwardly evangelical.

Street life

Back in the 1970s I had an art-student friend whose tutor was a legendary art guru. My friend experienced a dramatic conversion one summer. Full of enthusiasm and deeply concerned to witness for Christ, he returned to college, where he was carpeted by his tutor for not producing enough work.

'But,' my friend responded, 'I've found God!'

'Yes,' replied his tutor. 'But did you bring any paintings back?'

Peter Howson met God and brought some paintings back. The Flowers exhibition featured two sequences - one drawings, the other paintings - of the fourteen Stations of the Cross. Other works included 'The Third Step', a painting of a naked man crawling across a ruined landscape towards a church, over the door of which is a sunlit crucifix.

Howson's Stations bear the ugliness and pain of his past experiences. He is famous for his depiction of tough Glasgow street life: coarse-grained faces, limbs seeming to possess too many muscles, like the figures that inhabit the work of William Blake. I have found that work somewhat mannered, as if, having painted one Glasgow brute, the others came fairly easy - almost, but not quite, formulaic.

First impressions of the painted Stations were that these too are turned out to a recipe: the scars of the crown of thorns, the whiplash bruises and the exertion of the cross all lend themselves to Howson's style, and the crown of thorns gives Jesus the look of a pagan green man. But no: these are not formula paintings.

Understanding

They are small, nine inches square, cropped close. Within this small space Howson packs in huge quantities of meaning. Jesus falls for the second time; we see only his upturned face, emphasising the cosmic inversion of the moment - but he is still looking at you. Jesus is stripped: his face is mutely consenting, all these things are happening because this bruised and bleeding man wants them to. He is taken down from the cross: his arm dominates the composition, draped across the one taking him down as if in some strange way the dead man is carrying his own body. He dies wide-eyed and aggressive - again, he is firmly in control. His dead body has a faint smile, as if approving a task well finished.

The drawings, also nine inches square, have broader compositions. Again, there is much meaning in the detail. Jesus falls for the second time and somebody squats on the cross, like a character from Hieronymus Bosch, crushing him further; the third time, a rat watches from a sewer. When Jesus is nailed to the cross his executioners pose balletically, recalling the dance resonances of the violence in A Clockwork Orange. At every point, Howson's understanding of what he is painting is clear.

The painting that moved me most is of Jesus's third fall. A soldier's hand aims a truncheon at his head, his face is pressed to the ground. A soldier's boot is inches away. But by some sleight of brush, the boot is a serpent. Its leather has become snakeskin, an ornament a baleful red eye, the seam of the sole its curling mouth. Jesus is looking at the serpent/boot with an expression of obsessive victory: it seems as if Jesus is wielding the truncheon. On the soldier's wrist a spiked bracelet looks like a real crown, contrasting with the lacerating thorns Christ wears. But the whole sequence is about inversion: who is really in control? Who is really making all this happen?

At this point theology and art may be said to become the same thing. The effect is riveting. Those who like their Christian art to be always pretty and comforting would do well to consider these works. A more powerful exposition of Philippians 4.8 you won't easily find.

The exhibition has now ended. A book of the Stations is available (£10) from Flowers East, 82 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DP, and both series can be seen on the gallery's website, www.flowerseast.co.uk.

Art and agony: and a sunlit cross

Street life

'But,' my friend responded, 'I've found God!'

Understanding

David Porter

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