Between: souza

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Sunday, 31 August 2025

Artlyst: The Art Diary September 2025

My latest Art Diary for Artlyst being for August/September provides an opportunity to look back as well as look forward. The celebrations for the centenary of Francis Newton Souza’s birth culminated in the first half of 2025. Other work exploring Christian themes or by Christian artists can be seen at MOCA Machynlleth, Gilbert White’s House, 54 Gallery (Society of Catholic Artists), Bradford 2025 (Methodist Collection of Modern Art), and The Mayor Gallery. Exhibitions of work by Marian Spore Bush and Sean Scully draw on the inspiration of nature, while Spore Bush and Juliette Minchin take inspiration from spiritualism and mysticism. Lucy Sparrow, Malcolm Doney, Petra Feriancová and Amanda Kyritsopoulou all draw inspiration from daily life. I end with two exhibitions on themes of diversity and inclusion.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Glen Hansard - Bird Of Sorrow.

Friday, 1 November 2024

Church Times - Art review: Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads — In and Out of Our Time (Ben Uri Gallery, London NW8)

My latest exhibition review for C hurch T imes is on 'Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads — In and Out of Our Time' at Ben Uri Gallery:

'In experimenting with heads, shapes, and their dissolution by use of colour and the interplay between human and natural forms, Ribeiro achieves intensity and, as one reviewer put it, “enormous expressive power”.

His achievement is under-appreciated and under-recognised, and yet the thread that runs throughout his work, as identified by a close friend, the poet, Indian translator, and critic R. Parthasarathy, is of relevance to us all: “How does a human being come to terms with multiple histories and in the process achieve wholeness?”'

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here, those for Seen & Unseen are here, and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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Mike Peters - Breathe.

Sunday, 15 April 2018

Picasso To Souza: The Crucifixion

My latest article for Artlyst explores powerfully expressive crucifixion images found in two of the Tate’s current exhibitions. In 1932, the ‘year of wonders’ explored by Tate Modern’s Picasso 1932: Love Fame Tragedy, Picasso created thirteen seminal ink drawings of the Crucifixion, while All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life at Tate Britain showcases the fearful and terrible grandeur of the 1959 Crucifixion by F.N. Souza:

'Between the two World Wars and in the aftermath of World War II, Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece with its brutally realistic depiction of the suffering endured by the crucified provided a frame and inspiration for artists such as Picasso, Rouault, Buffet, Bacon, Sutherland and Souza to protest the violence unleashed by human beings in that most bloody of centuries. The Tate’s current exhibitions provide an opportunity to explore some of less well-known and less frequently exhibited of these images, which ultimately stand as a warning against our human tendency to attack and destroy those we scapegoat.'

My other Artlyst articles and interviews are:

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Sufjan Stevens - Ring Them Bells.

Saturday, 3 March 2018

Fire Sermon & The Book of Chocolate Saints

In her interesting Guardian review of Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon, Molly McCloskey asks, given intellectual life generally has become secularised:

'How, then, are we to read a novel in which the protagonists – intellectuals, academics, adulterers – are believers, their struggles conveyed not with irony but with earnestness? How, from the writer’s point of view, to convey the weight of sin, the claustrophobia that must result from its commission, when writing about characters who have faith?'

Faith also features in Jeet Thayil's The Book of Chocolate Saints which is 'a profound and often very funny meditation on worship, representation and reality, partly inspired by his own childhood.'

Preti Taneja writes:

'Thayil was born in 1959 and grew up in a Syrian Christian family in Kerala, south India; his father is the critically acclaimed journalist and biographer TJS George. Religion and art rubbed shoulders: the faith is one of the oldest forms of Christianity. Services are still conducted in Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Thayil remembers his grandmother was able to recite all the words of the service, though she did not know what they meant. He was surrounded by an iconography of blond, blue-eyed saints. The inherent betrayal in this only became clear to him years later.

“I realised that so many of the saints that we think of as white, as Caucasian, were not,” he says. “They were swarthy, dark skinned, black haired, unwashed men and women. I got very excited and I started looking for these saints and it’s astonishing how many there are.” A series of saint poems – some based on real people, some imagined – are in the new book.

The book’s elusive hero is Newton Francis Xavier, a fictional poet from the real Bombay school of the 1970s and 80s, who later lives in New York. Alcoholic, wild man, painter, star – he’s a composite of many people including the celebrated Indian modern artist FN Souza and the revered Indian English-language poet Dom Moraes.'

Paintings by F N Souza can be seen in All Too Human at Tate Britain which as Matthew Collings notes 'has a large section devoted to a good and energetic Indian communist painter ... who lived in London in the Fifties and Sixties.' Mark Hudson writes that one of the show’s “discoveries” is 'the London-based Indian mystical expressionist FN Souza': 'If the sudden appearance of a knowingly primitive, magic-realist sensibility feels anomalous amid the prevailing austerity-era drabs and khakis of the School of London, the best of Souza’s works such as the jagged, Voodoo-flavoured Crucifixion, 1959, and the towering and frankly intimidating Black Woman, 1961, share a kind of haggard spiritual kinship with [Francis] Bacon – a sense of torment, common to the post-war period, that goes deeper than style.'

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Eric Bibb - Forgiveness Is Gold.

Saturday, 3 December 2011

Beyond 'Airbrushed from Art History' (10)

Fr. Roy Mathew Thottam, a Jesuit artist-priest in Kerala, suggests that the role of Christian artists in India has changed :

"There was a time in the Church when the written Bible was not available to the people. The themes were depicted through paintings, so that common people could understand the Bible and Church teachings.

In modern times, artists deal not so much with the description of the Bible but are more concerned with the interpretation of the Word. They take the ‘word’, reflect and meditate on it, and explain or interpret according to the socio-cultural reality they live in, according to each one’s experience of God."

He calls his own artistic search a "pilgrimage, journeying through the interior world, lives of the people, and the reality I live in. It is to do with a spiritual quest. In fact, every art is spiritual; it is something like meditation."

Angelo da Fonseca and Alfred D. Thomas made serious efforts during the 1930's to find Indian roots for Christian painting in India. They sought to create authentic Indian images of Christ retaining the universalities of Christ. Christ was often portrayed in Indian clothes, as talking to typical Indian villagers and set in typical Indian landscape.

Several outstanding modern Indian painters, such as Jamini Roy, Ravi Varma, Nandalal Bose and M. Reddeppa Naidu, while not Christians, nevertheless painted pictures of Jesus or chose Christian themes in order to portray the nature and predicament of humanity in society. As a former student of the Madras Christian College, K. C. S. Paniker was familiar with the Bible and when he wanted to depict suffering and pain he chose to paint Christ.

Alphonso Doss writes in his article ‘The Image of Christ in Indian Art’:

"Mr. S. Dhanapal and Mr. P.V. Janakiram made bronze and metal sculptures depicting the image of Jesus in 1962 - 65. "Christ carrying the cross" was a popular composition done by S. Dhanapal in bronze which was selected for a National Academy award in 1962. The other sculpture named "Christ carrying the cross" is a group sculpture, in which Christ carrying the cross with his followers depict and express grief and sorrow. In both these sculptures one can see the face and the figuration following Indian contemporary style of expression. The eyes and elongated face of Christ convey a deep sense pf compassion and tolerance which are the characteristic portrayal of Christ ...

Internationally reputed sculptor P.V. Janakiram, aged 72, disciple of K.C.S. Panicker and S. Dhanapal has also been influenced by the suffering of Jesus Christ. He made several figures of Christ, Madonna, Crucifixion conveying the Christian spirit in his work. The most striking one is the sculpture showing Christ stretching his hands expressing love, unity done in copper sheet metal. Welding is employed to fix the copper rod to suggest hair and beard. The whole sculpture is oxidized except the centre area where the brass sheet is welded in the front portion on which decorative elements are found with geometric pattern to beautify the sculpture."

Francis Newton Souza, born in the Portuguese colony of Goa to Indian parents, was brought up as a strict Catholic. In 1949, having become a well-established artist in India, he moved to Britain. After six difficult years living in London, he began to build a considerable reputation as a writer and painter. Souza was the first of India's modern painters to achieve high recognition in the West. His work is in major museum collections around the world including the Tate. As with those mentioned above images of Christ form an important strand within his work.

Among modern and contemporary Indian painters who are Christians are the following, whose work commonly addresses experiences of mixed religious backgrounds and has more recently led to the Indian Christian Art Association and Indian Christian Artists Forum:

Dr. Jyoti Sahi studied art at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and gained a Doctorate in Divinity from Serampore College. Over the years he has taught art at various institutions and centres in India and worked free lance, at the Kurisumala Ashram with Dom Bede Griffiths and Laurie Baker, designing works for Indian Churches. Coming from a mixed religious background having Hindu and Christian roots, Jyoti has spent the last forty years trying to see how it is possible to bridge/integrate these religious and cultural divides through art. He is particularly interested in the relation of Christian symbols and stories to the sacred images that are found in other faith traditions, particularly in the Indian tradition. As an artist, he has been actively involved with various non governmental groups in India concerned with social change.

Frank Wesley was born in Azamgarh, U.P., India in December 1923 into a fifth generation Christian family. His first art exhibition was in 1935. He studied at the government school of Arts and Crafts in Lucknow from 1943 to 1948 . Further studies included four years at the Kyoto Art University in Japan (1954-58) and two years at the Art Institute of Chicago (1958-60). His work has been internationally recognised. He designed the urn for Mahatma Ghandhi's ashes. Five of his paintings were included in the 1950 Holy Year Exhibition at the Vatican. "The Blue Madonna" was used as the first UNICEF Christmas card. In 1973, he emigrated to Australia with his family. He continued to paint prolifically until his death in 2002. In 1993 Naomi Wray published "Frank Wesley: Exploring faith with a brush", (Auckland, Pace publishing), a book that explores Frank's Christian painting.

Ashrafi S. Bhagat writes in ‘Of light, signs and symbols’ that:

"Within the terrain of the Madras Movement internationally acclaimed Alphonso [Doss] is a familiar name. An alumnus of the Government College of Arts and Crafts, he taught painting there and retired as a principal in 1997 ... His depth of knowledge of Christianity in tandem with the philosophy of Hinduism and Buddhism posits him as an artist who can traverse freely across both spheres with these symbols to contextualise his works within a cultural milieu marking it as individual and universal as well. Though his concepts and ideologies transcend the national boundaries to be almost global, there is in Alphonso's works a strong hint of the nativist agenda that was engined by K.C.S. Paniker in the early 60s to establish the face of the Madras Movement within the larger framework of the national milieu."

Joy Elamkunnapuzha drew an original design for Christ the Guru in 1977 and V. Balan executed it in mosaic style on the facade of the Chapel at Dharmaram College in Bangalore, India: "Christ is presented as a yogi in meditation under the sacred peepal tree. He is seated in padmaasanam, the lotus posture. The calm and compassionate look on the face depicts the image of the ideal guru , spiritual teacher, in the Indian scriptures. The hand gestures show jnaanamudra, the sign of imparting knowledge and wisdom that dispel darkness (the Sanskrit term guru is a combination of gu, "darkness," and ru, "that which dispels"). The red color on the hands and feet shows the nail marks from crucifixion. They are the signs that St. Thomas, the Apostle of India insisted on as proof of Jesus's resurrection (Jn 20: 24-29). The equal-armed cross is presented in the form of a flower. The flame represents both Christ and the devotee alike; it is a reminder of two complementary sayings of Jesus: "I am the light of the world" (Jn 8:12) and "You are the light of the world" (Mt 5: 14). The two halves of a coconut, often placed at the forefront during religious rituals in India, is a symbol of self-sacrifice. The chalice with bread and grapes represents the sacrificial gift of Jesus in the holy Eucharist."

Alle G. Hoekema writes, in a review of The Poor Man’s Bible, that:

"Dr. P. Solomon Raj, a Lutheran theologian and creative artist from India … became a school teacher, then studied theology at Gurukul, Madras, served as a minister and as a student chaplain and after that fulfilled a wide range of positions in India, at Selly Oak, Birmingham UK and other countries before settling down again in his own country. In the meantime he published his PhD dissertation in Birmingham and was active in the Asian Christian Arts Association. Since a number of years he is the spiritual father of the St. Luke’s Lalitkala Ashram in Vijayawada, Andra Pradesh.

In the 1950s he discovered his gift as an artist, first specializing in linocuts and wood block printing (black and white, later coloured ones as well) and then also in designing batiks, and — though to a lesser extent — acryl paintings. Serving in the field of modern mass communication as a means of propagating the Gospel, he discovered the possibilities of using visual art in explaining the biblical narratives. Most of the art works which he published in separate booklets and books are accompanied by brief, often surprising, poetical meditations which remind one of the work of Rabindranath Tagore and others.

In an unpublished paper Solomon Raj himself speaks about the prophetic role of the Christian artist. Like prophets, the artist is an instrument of inspiration, a visionary and fore-teller who uses symbolic language. And, ‘he is aware of the problems in the society in which he lives, he speaks the vocabulary and the idiom of his time and he wakes up people of his day to some of the things that agitate his mind.’"

US-based Goan painter-scholar Jose Pereira has said that he sees himself "as a product of two traditions: one is the Latin-Christian tradition and the other is the Indian Hindu tradition." In order to bring to expression these traditions, he says he has had to do extensive research. In 2010 paintings by Pereira depicting Hindu Lord Shiva dancing with six naked maidens and Krishna in sexual ecstasy in the midst of several women were withdrawn from an exhibition of Pereira’s paintings at The Xavier Centre of Historical Research in Goa following threats by Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (Hindu Awareness Forum) to decapitate the 89-year-old painter.

In 2006 Edwin Parmar turned a huge canvas into a monumental work of art in which Christ, Hindu gods and Indian traditions blend. He got the idea for this larger-than-life painting from a question: "What would be Christ's life if he had been born in an Indian village?" Parmar found his answer in a synthesis of Indian and western cultures. Thus, in his painting Mary wears a sari and Hindu God Rama interacts with Christ.

Susheila Williams "is the president of the Indian Christian art association. She is also the founder secretary of the Chitrakala academy in Coimbatore. The Indian Christian art association is an association of Christian artists in India. This association conducts workshops and organizes exhibitions of paintings. It also brings out a quarterly news letter called ‘Pratima’. Mrs. Williams founded the Chitrakala academy, in coimbatore in the year 1978 and from its inception this artists association has been functioning well. She underwent her training in New Delhi under Mr. Anand Micheal from the Michigan University. She travels extensively and participates in art exhibitions at the national and international level."

She "specializes in oil painting and terracotta sculptures. Her oil painting titled ‘THE SAMARITAN WOMEN’ adorns the pope’s official residence at Vatican. Some of her theme paintings on UNITY IN DIVERSITY have found its way into posters thus ensuring that the message has effectively reached the society. Her speciality is in using Christian themes in the Indian context so that the message of the scriptures is understandable and acceptable by the community."

The Catholic Bishop’s Conference of India reported in 2010 that:

"A group of leading Christian artists in India under the initiative of the CBCI Commission for Social Communications has established a national network called the Indian Christian Artists Forum. Artist priest Dr. Paul Kattukaran of Trichur Archdiocese, has been appointed as the national coordinator for the Forum. Fifteen renowned artists from various parts of the country attended the first meeting of the Christian artists in India convened by the CBCI Commission at the CPCI Centre, Bangalore, August 4.

Those who attended the meeting included renowned artists and theologian Jyoti Sahi, Chennai based artist and former principal of Madras College of Fine Arts Mr. Alphonso Doss, former director of Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, and well known sculptor Robin David, Bangalore-based artist C.F. John, artist Edwin Parmar, Ahmedabad, Sr.Vincy, Bongaigaon, Assam, Fr. Roy M. Thottam SJ, Kochi and others.

The Forum is intended to bring together Christian artists from different parts of the country to foster greater collaboration and professional support and exchange. It intends to promote study and appreciation of Christian art among various sections of the people- clergy, religious and laity in the church, and the wider society in India, and to encourage a deeper understanding, appreciation and application of Indian Christian art in theology, liturgy and architecture in the Church in India."
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George Harrison - My Sweet Lord.

Friday, 1 January 2010

Airbrushed from Art History (14)

Expressionism has continued to be understood and used by artists from a variety of differing cultures as a medium and movement which is particularly appropriate to the exploration of spiritual and Biblical themes. This can be clearly seen by describing significant aspects of the work of four unrelated artists: Graham Sutherland, F. N. Souza, Arthur Boyd and Peter Howson.

Sutherland was already a significant neo-romantic British artist working in a landscape-based tradition when he was approached by Revd. Walter Hussey, Vicar of St Matthews Northampton , regarding a commission for a painting which would face the Madonna and Child already commissioned from Henry Moore. In view of Sutherland’s landscape-based work Hussey suggested The Agony in the Garden as the subject of the work but Sutherland requested that instead he paint a crucifixion.

While this suggests a need on Sutherland’s part to move beyond the restrictions of his landscape-based reputation, it was nevertheless in landscape that he initially found inspiration for the form of his Crucifixion. Sutherland wrote, in an article for The Listener:

“I started to notice thorn bushes, and the structure of thorns as they pierced the air. I made some drawings, and as I made them, a curious change developed. As the thorns rearranged themselves, they became whilst still retaining their own pricking space encompassing life, something else – a kind of stand-in for a Crucifixion and a crucified head.”

Sutherland combined this exploration with images of tortured bodies photographed in Nazi concentration camps which “looked like figures deposed from crosses” and with the crucifixions painted by Matthais Grünewald.

Revd. Tom Devonshire Jones has described well the resulting work in Images of Christ:

“All the elements worked out in the studies are present: the freely interpreted crown of thorns and the debilitated legs from the Concentration Camp photographs. But the real suffering is in the arms and hands. The fingers curl up in agony. The taut arms pull the ribcage away from the rest of the body, as if a dead stag was being torn apart. In this painting Christ is still in the process of dying. Herein lies its original and frightening power.”

For Sutherland, with his focus on the agonized death inherent in crucifixion, expressionist forms and colours were essential to the depiction of such agony and to its representation as an icon of all who suffer through the inhumanity of human beings one to another.

F. N. Souza was another for whom expressionist form and colour were essential means in depicting the agony of crucifixion. George Melly has described well in Religion and Erotica the savage cross-hatching and cubist fragmentation of forms which mean “that there is no overt sentimentality in the artist’s religious iconography”, indeed, Melly suggests, “he expresses no obvious belief in redemption, only in suffering” as he “seems to attack his evocations of the sacred with angry cross-hatching to the point of near obliteration.”

Melly writes:

“Every artist to be reckoned with tends to invent their own trademarks. In Souza’s case, the religious work especially it is the very small forehead ... a portrait of Christ, his neck and torso pierced by two symbolic arrows, there is hardly room to jam on the crown of thorns. The eyes too are unnaturally high in the head and in this case, as in many others blacked-out. In this drawing, for example, Jesus weeps rods rather than tears, framed by ... fish skeletons ... This comparatively common device, is used not only to represent tears, but beards and hair are quite often treated in this way. The arrows also appear elsewhere, surely a symbol of suffering, borrowed from that pincushion, St Sebastian.”

In this Souza was influenced firstly by the Roman Catholicism of his youth, he was born in the Catholic province of Goa in India, and has written of seeing “the enormous crucifix with the impaled image of a Man supposed to be the son of God, scourged and dripping, with matted hair tangled in plaited thorns.” Secondly, he was influenced by the modernist movement and the work of Picasso in particular. Roger Wollen, in writing of The Crucifixion from 1962 now in the Methodist Church Collection of Modern Art, describes this work as “overtly expressionist in style and the figure on Jesus’ left ... is conveyed in a cubist style, with four superimposed eyes, two looking at Jesus and two looking out of the painting at the viewer.” The result, in the words of Nevile Wallis, are great crucifixions; “barbaric in colour” with “scrawny jagged forms, and thorny shapes” burning in their “terrible conviction.”

As Edwin Mullins says in F. N. Souza:

“Souza’s treatment of the figurative image is richly varied. Besides the violence, the eroticism and the satire, there is a religious quality about his work which is medieval in its simplicity and in its unsophisticated sense of wonder. Some of the most moving of Souza’s paintings are those which convey a spirit of awe in the presence of divine power ... in his religious work there is a quality of fearfulness and terrible grandeur which even Rouault and Graham Sutherland have not equalled in this century.”

Melly writes that Souza became a committed modernist in 1947 when he and his friends “had to rely, in the Bombay of that time, on books and magazines” for images of modernist works. “This was not unique to India,” Melly says, as “Australia, too, was full of converts and suffered, as they later admitted, from what they called ‘the cultural cringe’.” It is to Australia that we turn next to find the expressionist element in the biblically inspired work by Arthur Boyd.

Boyd’s early imagery changed dramatically through the onset of the Second World War. Robert Hughes proposed in a 1964 article on Boyd and Sidney Nolan for the Nation, that “the war convulsed Boyd’s arcadian plein-airism into ... wider expressionist images.” Barry Pearce has written, in Arthur Boyd, of Boyd projecting his personal sense of pessimism “against the world at large through a powerful series of biblical paintings” (which include The Mockers and The Mourners of 1945) and cites Franz Philipp as saying in 1947:

“Boyd is not just telling a story. He is saying ... how he feels about his time, about the state of the world ... Why the Crucifixion and not the Concentration Camp? Mine (and perhaps the artist’s reply) would be that the factual statement is apt to remain merely documentary, whilst the symbol of the Crucifixion enables the artist to stress the universal – one might almost say – the metaphysical aspect of the event ... the subject of ‘The Mockers’ is orgiastic hatred, the St Vitus dance of a possessed humanity.”

This use of biblical narrative was to be repeated later in Boyd’s career with the Nebuchadnezzar series of paintings. Pearce notes Ursula Hoff’s suggestion that:

“... it was not insignificant that the Nebuchadnezzar works were made at the height of the Vietnam war. As the 1960s moved towards the end of the decade, nations became divided by images of horror that confronted them in the mass media: villages incinerated, men and women tortured and killed, children screaming from the pain of napalm. Self-immolation in protest actually took place on Hampstead Heath near Boyd’s house, and once more a biblical subject by him was seen to be an allegory of the descent of humanity in a conflicted world; except this time instead of grotesque masses sliding into a hell of their own making, the focus was on the crisis of an individual.”

The major war reflected in the work and life of Peter Howson was the Bosnian conflict which he observed as an official War Artist but conflict and suffering have featured in his work from its earliest appearance, again with biblical references. Robert Heller writes in Peter Howson that “many of Howson’s mature works are deeply influenced by apocalyptic thoughts and biblical references.”

Heller writes that:

“Howson is hard to place in the current British art scene, where his taste for the heroic, the poignant and the violent is not widely shared. Taking the longer view, he still remains a difficult fit. Sources and masters can easily be found for the apocalyptic paintings, the series, the caricatures, the narratives, and so on. But nobody covers the same great range – though Goya, the past master, who makes the most intriguing comparison, with his phenomenal output, passion for drawing and genius at caricature, comes very close. The two artists, two centuries apart, have even tackled the same subject – Blind leading the Blind.

The Biblical passage concerned has inspired other artists, including Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breughal (Howson’s inspiration for this motif) and Cornelis Massys, whose 1540 etching is very Howsonian in composition and style. Howson’s work, though, is not a single picture, but a series of ten powerful paintings, each depicting different forms of morally bankrupt humanity, and culminating in a frenzied crowd scene whose brilliant composition focuses on a sexually threatening girl in a skimpy dress.

The series makes two important statements about this painter: first, it establishes his artistic lineage, that of a young master who stands on the shoulders of giants; second, it sets out his ethical standpoint, that of a moralist who is uncompromising in his depiction of human failure and folly, but who paints them with a deep underlying respect for life itself. To these two statements, the rehabilitated Howson has added a third dimension: that of a power greater by far than man, but freely available as the sole source of man’s redemption.

The series which was heading for completion as I wrote these words was a commission from an inspired collector – inspired because The Stations of the Cross coincided so deeply with Howson’s own spiritual needs and preoccupations at this time. In the related and very powerful series of drawings, The Man of Sorrows, Christ is reminiscent of the tortured down-and-outs who figure so powerfully in Howson’s portrait gallery; but the drawings also contain passages which recall some of the self-portraits that run like a sub-theme through the painter’s oeuvre. The idea of suffering humanity being redeemed through the suffering of the Son of God at once subjects the individual to God and releases the individual into a saved life.

The crucifixion is the ultimate symbol of this theology ... The saved drawings on which the painted Stations are based have both delicacy and power, ranging from brilliantly composed crowd scenes to to a Christ attended only by two grieving women; from savage brutality to keening tenderness; from the dramatic (a massively strong man lifting the Cross beneath whose weight Jesus has fallen) to the matter-of-fact (two non-threatening workmen hammering in the nails – ‘just doing me job, mate’). At every station, the viewer is haunted by the infinitely sad face of the condemned Christ.”

Heller concludes that:“Howson is a thinker, and his thoughts illumine his work. Yet the seemingly raw emotion in his paintings is what, above all, has constituted his image and aura. The emotions, like the characters who project them, are generally ugly ... A certain fascination with violence has informed a considerable amount of Howson’s art ... Howson paints life through painting people, sometimes as straight portraits, but mostly as imaginary members of the vast population which inhabits his teeming canvases. He can be justifiably excused for the violence in these faces and figures, because violence lurks somewhere in everybody – as it does in Howson himself.”

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David Rawlings Machine - I Hear Them All.