In the Studio with Paul Housley

Paul Housley’s pictures tell stories. They tell stories about what it means to grow up in a Britain in decline. They depict what it means to remember our most formative experiences, whether listening to a record that will go on to change your life, or what it means to have your heart broken for the first time. Widely celebrated as ‘the Lowry of the contemporary world’, Housley has that knack to populate his paintings, often without him willing it, with narratives that stay with you long after you’ve encountered his canvases. In his paintings, we can see the iconoclastic droogs in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange lining up for a night on the town of mischief and violence. We can see a younger version of the painter imagining pining over a lost love in the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. We run into Bonnie and Clyde at the multiplex. Despite the rough and textured surfaces of his paintings, which often look quite abstract, Housley’s paintings feel like they have shouldered over to you in a busy pub and whispered a secret into your ear.

Housley, who was born and raised under the permanent rainclouds of Manchester, has never stopped having things to say about his hometown. Or, for that matter, England. His paintings of Mancunian street scenes might be transformed by bright colours, and look more like Vincent van Gogh’s Arles rather than Salford, but they still have the Joy Division soundtrack. Rightly, Housley shies away from being pigeon-holed as a ‘state of the nation’ artist, the kind of artist who makes pronouncements on what it means to live in a particular country at a particular time in history. He never does that. He observes the world as it is, he smells it, takes it all in, and paints what he feels.

Today, Housley’s studio is in a labyrinthine former industrial complex off a side-street in Bethnal Green, not far from Cambridge Heath station. He works there every day, without fail. Looking closely at his bookcase, I find everything from hardback-and-dust-jacket tomes on Pablo Picasso, moth eaten like he’s read every inch, to skeletal-thin poetry pamphlets. He’s clearly a voracious reader. Works in progress occupy much of the ground. It’s like a salon. The paintings, and some seem long finished and growing old, populate the space like people, or most specifically like guests milling about at a party. ‘You can make your own little world in the studio’, Housley says, stepping back to allow me to take proper stock of the works, especially those huddled on the floor as much those prepared for display on the walls. ‘It’s a refuge, and sometimes can feel like a prison’, he tells me: ‘but it’s always the place I want to spend the most time in.’ 

After a pause, he tells me that being an artist is a way to navigate life: ‘I call people who don’t make art civilians… when you decide to become an artist, you’ve ascended to the ranks of a kind of league, a kind of community that goes around the world.’ Even in his thick corduroy blazer and baby blue jumper, you can tell that Housley is a grafter, and envisions himself as a worker. The clothes are comfortable and hardy, to be sure. In them, Housley exudes a work ethic that means a simple thing: he does one thing over a life, builds muscle memory, and goes on doing it every day. Like the best artists, Housley is a perfect mix of ego, talent, and hard work, epitomised by his painting, The Empire of Light, 2024, which is currently displayed in an exhibition at Cedric Bardawil in Soho. The artist, crouched down with his easels and pigments scattered around him, looks equal parts despot and jailbird. Housley is the kind of artist who doesn’t make distinctions between the two. He is called to make his work: in front of the canvas, he is both weak and powerful.

‘All of my paintings are about specific atmospheres and times’, Housley tells me: ‘but I have no desire to reproduce those places absolutely faithfully, or with warped nostalgia, and instead it’s all about the potency of the memory.’ I am struck by how often Housley stresses the ways in which his painting process is about what the body feels like rather than what something looks like. He’s interested in what the temperature felt like on the back of your neck when you felt something for the first time. Housley is a real painter’s painter, one of those artists who is known throughout the London art scene. But his paintings still feel like stories, like secrets, that haven’t been fully told yet. 

Paul Housley’s solo exhibition Discipline of Ecstasy is on at Cedric Bardawil, 1–3 Old Compton Street, London W1D 5JB until 21 December 2024.