Paul Howson

Art Brokerage: Paul Howson American Artist: Paul Howson is an artist of disarming visual honesty. His work, which at different stages in his career has celebrated allegory and allegorised celebrity, depicting the landscapes of modern war and internal struggle and with a Goyaesque brilliance, is testament to an obsessive occupation with the dark recesses of existence that developed into a muscular faith and spiritualism. Howson is a compelling storyteller. The new works shown here - epic oils and dense hatchings of graphite on gesso - are not academic or didactic in the style of history painting, but the sublimation of revelatory personal narratives. Religious overtures are proceeded by confession, as intimate details of the artist's familial and spiritual relationships punctuate the parables of his urban imagination. Howson describes the works as 'autobiographical or semi-autobiographical', pictorial evidence of the pain and turmoil resulting from his daughter Lucie's struggles with epilepsy and Asperger's Syndrome. He credits Lucie for saving him from a spiral of alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity and obsessive behaviour; the destructive prelude to his conversion to Christianity in 2000. Howson reconciles the trauma of Lucie's condition by seeing it as 'a faith test' and, as such, the works - whilst pregnant with grief and suffering - are not without hope or redemptive possibility.