Portrait of an artist on... THE EDGE
‘I say I am religious, but I am one of the worst Christians that’s ever lived. I’ve been a total delinquent for a long, long time’
AFOOTPATH is rumoured to run along the crumbling clifftops above the harbour at Catterline, in Aberdeenshire. Walkers trying to follow it quickly f i nd t hemselves squeezed close to a precipitous drop to the rocks below, with a barbed wire fence separating them from neighbouring farmers’ fields. Disaster is but a loose step away. Yet this is the route that celebrated artist and Asperger’s sufferer Peter Howson has chosen to follow as part of his charity walk Putting Autism On The Map – a 300-mile epic that should take him from Aberdeen to Ayr in four weeks
This is only Day Two and, as a drizzly low mist closes in, the support crew are considering whether to keep following the hazy path or dart over the fence to the relative safety of the fields.
Howson, meanwhile, ploughs on regardless with the aid of two walking poles, scrabbling over rough grass and loose rocks, either of which could send him flying 60ft into the briny below.
Not for the first time in his life, the painter with an almost legendary propensity for self-endangerment was straying close to the edge.
For once, however, Howson insists he is in a good place. Having negotiated the vertiginous cliff track without mishap, he accepts he will always be as well known for his own troubled life as his highly prized depictions of human misery and suffering.
‘I suspect people may be interested in my life because of the trauma I have been through. I say I am religious, but I am one of the worst Christians that’s ever lived; I have been a total delinquent for a long, long time – I’ve never been good,’ he said, with blank frankness.
‘There hasn’t been anything I haven’t been into, that’s the problem. But I try to be good. I have an obsessive personality and I think I’m drawn to danger, too. For a long time, I hadn’t wanted to be here and this is the first time in years I have wanted to live.’
Those lost years were spent lurching from one personal crisis to another – from drink and drug addictions to his struggles with undiagnosed autism and a battle against depression which drove him to attempt suicide several times.
His most recent setback came as recently as last summer, just after he relaunched himself on the art scene with a major exhibition at the Maclaurin Gallery in his home town of Ayr.
Even as he was declaring himself well again, the familiar dark clouds were gathering and he was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in July. It took months to nurse him back to health.
One of those who helped him was Lorraine King, a friend he first met in 2010 – the year after his Asperger’s was finally diagnosed – as a fellow in-patient at the Priory Hospital in Glasgow.
The pair are now engaged to be married and 56-year- old Howson attributes his new air of positivity largely to the fact he is in love and to his new passion for walking.
‘It was sheer luck I met Lorraine when I did. I was in a terrible place,’ he said. ‘Last summer, I was coming through a bad time; I had done that big exhibition and that did me in. I was going down, I was spiralling, really. And the next day I was back in the Priory.
‘I’ve been really ill for six years. At one point I wouldn’t have made this walk because I was on 23 medications. A nurse got me walking again last year. At first, I was so weak I could only walk about 100 yards, but I built it up.
‘But I am well again. I am properly in love for the first time in my life, I feel very strong and the illness is behind me now. I don’t think these episodes will happen again. I am more worried about my Achilles, which is causing me problems, but I’ll get there.’
As a reaffirmation of life, the artist sees the walk as a pilgrimage: ‘But life is a pilgrimage. One of my favourite books is CS Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress, an allegory about the author’s search for his religious identity. It’s loosely based on [John] Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I keep seeing connections to it on this walk. The seagulls by the cliffs, the old manse, the chasm they had to cross by a leap of faith…’
His fiancee is accompanying him on this 15-mile stretch of the route from Catterline to St Cyrus along with physio Dave Jenkins, whose main tasks are navigation and offering painrelieving massages on Howson’s dodgy Achilles tendon.
Miss King, 48, a former office manager for Scottish Enterprise, said: ‘When I got in contact with Peter last July to see if he was OK, I got the
shock of my life because he was half the size he is now. He could hardly walk and he was awful-looking. He kept telling me he was dying. He was in a bad state and there was no one there.’
Howson was also self-harming, smashing his fists into door frames and hitting his head off the iron bed in his Glasgow flat. He remembers nothing of these episodes – Miss King calls them his ‘frazzles’.
She said: ‘I can tell when he’s “frazzling”. It’s like an inner frustration trying to get out, trying to escape from that world he was in with people manipulating him, people wanting things from him and not allowing him to do his work.
‘Because the best time to see Peter is working, it’s fabulous. He drifts into this almost hypnotic state.
‘I can go in and ask if he wants a coffee and I don’t get a word from him, so I j ust go and make it anyway…’
The couple appear genuinely happy. Over lunch and a double helping of mince and tatties, which Howson wolfs down in a matter of minutes, they recall the racier fan mail the artist receives from his many female admirers:
One female artist keeps writing to me saying “I can’t live without you, I’ve got to have you” and telling me what she’d like to do to me. explicit stuff…’ They dissolve into paroxysms of giggling.
He looks on like a doting uncle as she jokes about her terrible cooking and the obsession with cleaning which landed her in the Priory, before namedropping shamelessly about A-list parties they are often invited to in London. Recently, it was a bash for Boston-born philanthropist and banker John Studzinski. ‘We were with David Bailey and Joanna Lumley and I met Angela Lansbury,’ she squealed.
When Howson reels off his famous friends in his flat, quick tones, it sounds almost like a shopping list: ‘I’ve known three Bond baddies – Berkoff, Robbie Coltrane, who played a Russian Mafia guy, and Christopher Lee, who played Scaramanga in The Man With The Golden Gun. Christopher Lee and I used to have afternoon tea in London. He was very, very handsome, very tall, quite tetchy, opinionated, brilliant, elegant. Great opera singer.’ What about the most famous 007? ‘Yeah, I know Sean pretty well.’
Another aspect of the walk will be the sketches he produces along the way. He aims to complete up to ten drawings a day to be auctioned off at the end of the walk at the Maclaurin Gallery on April 25 to raise funds for the charity Scottish Autism.
It is a cause close to his heart as both he and his daughter Lucie, now 28, suffer from the condition.
Howson’s marriage to Lucie’s mother, Terri, collapsed after he returned, traumatised, from an Imperial War Museum painting assignment in Bosnia in 1993.
But he maintains close ties with his daughter: ‘She struggles a lot more than I do, but she’s incredible. She has a great sense of humour – very black, probably from me.’
With the weather closing in rapidly, the day’s sketching will start after the walking is done, but Howson shows off the previous day’s work. They are predominantly facial studies, some bearing more than a passing resemblance to the artist himself. As an Asperger’s sufferer, he had to teach himself to look people in the eye. The piercing eyes staring back from the page are particularly unnerving.
When his illness has allowed, Howson’s prodigious workrate is matched only by the demand from celebrity clients i ncluding David Bowie, Madonna and Bill Gates, who pay up to £85,000 for a painting.
Yet he maintains he’s penniless, a situation he blames on the ‘sharks and gangsters’ who have ripped him off down the years. ‘I’m a moneymaker, and some people have taken advantage of that in the past.
‘I can’t read people’s motives and the only way I could show my affection and love for people was to throw money at them or to give them presents, because I thought I wasn’t worthy of anything else.
THAT’S put me in some quite dangerous positions and using drugs and alcohol was my way of coping. I’ve made a lot of money but I don’t have any of it. Right now, I’m down to zero.’
In December, former manager William O’neil was jailed for mortgage fraud and money-laundering. Glasgow Sheriff Court heard that O’neil was meant to have split the proceeds 50/50 with the artist from numerous sales of Howson’s paintings through his art dealing firm, Art & Soul, but its accounts showed no profit or loss figures and little turnover. Howson had to sell 200 drawings from his private collection to save himself from bankruptcy.
Stopping by a bridge in the now-pelting rain to light up a cigarette (his only remaining vice), Howson reflected: ‘ People have ripped me off all my life because I have a very trusting nature. They even went to my mother and father’s house and got paintings out from under my mother’s bed. But I’ve also stolen all my mum’s jewellery when I was young to pay for the drugs and the drink, so I’ve been bad as well.’
Six years ago, when he became seriously ill, Howson put his financial and professional affairs into the hands of a team of legal guardians, but he has recently taken back control of his life and Miss King operates as his business manager.
The future is looking a little brighter, unlike the weather above pretty St Cyrus Bay. He is working on a 35-painting commission for a benefactor in the Cayman Islands, and has just completed the sixth, entitled Jacob’s Ladder.
The walk is, he believes, further proof that he can stand on his own two feet. Raven Russia, an investment company in Russia, where Howson’s work i s popular, has already donated £50,000 to his fundraising efforts. He has invited his f riend, new Doctor Who Peter Capaldi, who attended Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s at the same time as Howson, to join him before the walk finishes.
Whatever happens in the coming weeks, one just hopes it is a step in the right direction.
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