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The title of London-based painter Paul Housley's recent New York solo debut, "Night Paintings," seems, at first, merely a disarmingly prosaic reference to the fact that the small, quiet pictures therein were made after dark. But there is more to the outwardly straightforward designation than that. Registering Housley's deceptively childlike handling and apparently affectless subject choices, one might, for a start, trace a connection to Night Studio, Musa Mayer's 1988 memoir of her father, Philip Guston. An association between the two artists has been made before: Writer and curator Andreas Leventis cites Guston in a 2005 catalogue essay on Housley, implying that the pair might share a fascination--and difficulty--with the attempt to render "a single form in...
