In 1973, Ken Howard was sent by the Imperial War Museum to cover the Troubles in Northern Ireland as a war artist in all but name. (In the political rhetoric of the day, the province’s violence did not constitute warfare.) To Howard’s surprise, he found that his habit of painting en plein air made him friends on both sides of the sectarian divide. “If you used a camera, you were in trouble,” he said. “If you sat on the street and drew, and they could see what you were doing, then you weren’t in trouble.”
An IRA man in the Falls Road biddably blew up a car to make it more picturesque for his brush, Howard claimed. It was a small boy he saw swinging from a lamp post who would become the focus of his best known work, however.
