Is Madness The Price of Peter Howson's Greatness

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By Tahlib

“It’s been crazy.” 

Image "My Lord and Master" from
2013 exhibition courtesy of Maclaurin Gallery

Some of the world’s most well loved artists wrestled with mental illness, so Peter Howson is in good company. But are artists such as Howson and Van Gogh, to name just two, actually crazier than the rest of the world? In 1992 Dr. Arnold M. Ludwig, a psychiatrist at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, published "The Price of Greatness," an extensive biographical survey of 1,005 famous 20th-century artists and writers, comparing their mental health with those of individuals in other, more conventional, professionals. Ludwig discovered that artists and writers experienced two to three times the rate of psychosis, suicide attempts, mood disorders, and substance abuse than did comparably successful people in business, science, and public life. In November 2010, BBC Scotland aired a documentary entitled “The Madness of Peter Howson” which followed the final stages of the completion of a grand commission of ‘The Martyrdom of St. John Ogilvie’ for St Andrew’s Cathedral and it also dealt with Howson’s struggles with mental illness. Soon after the filming, Howson was hospitalized.

"Women of America" (2001)

Similar research by psychologist J. Philippe Rushton found creativity to correlate with intelligence and psychoticism. Another study found creativity to be greater in schizotypal than in either normal or schizophrenic individuals, and so when you read about the mental illness challenges of John Howson, one can't help wondering if his fight with mental illness is his price for such greatness. His new exhibition at the Maclaurin Gallery in Scotland provides a forum for him to share his story.

"Legion" (2005)

Howson describes the journey frankly: “It’s been crazy,” he told a reporter at The Scotland Times. Th reporter added, "Over 15 months this big shambling hulk of a man, a lifelong Asperger’s sufferer, has been in and out of mental institutions and clinics, doped on uppers and downers, sunk in a 'distrubing and nightmarish' depression."

"Hades III" (2011)

Phil Miller at The Scotland Herald added this quote from Howson about his journey of art, faith and mental illness: "So there is mixture of the stuff I did in hospital and the brand new stuff, which is a lot more hopeful, slightly humorous maybe, and some Robert Burns imagery, mainly from Holy Willie's Prayer, because that is my favourite. Some of the Gartnavel stuff is pretty crazy really."