‘It’s like seeing old friends again,” says Peter Howson, looking both pleased and perplexed as he rubs a thick hand across his face. He is not talking about people but canvases, the ones now being hung in an Edinburgh gallery for a retrospective to mark his 65th birthday that will bring together around 100 works spanning his career as one of Scotland’s leading figurative painters.
Howson is an artist renowned for capturing men at their most brutal extremes, from the hyper-muscled football hooligans of his early work to the flexing soldiers of Putin’s private army in recent paintings, prompted by the war in Ukraine. But in person he is the polar opposite: vulnerable, self-critical, an apologist for his own excesses. His friend, the painter John Bellany, once told him: “Me and you were like volcanoes, spewing out all this stuff. A lot of it’s rubbish and a lot of it’s quite good.”
