The Work's the Thing (Abigail Norris & Jerry Rothwell)

A short film about the art and working methods of Paul Housley. Born in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, in 1964, Paul studied at the Royal College of Art. He has an interest in observing the everyday and a penchant for humble mass-produced objects. Like a number of other young UK artists, Paul is returning to figurative painting, at a time when video, photography, installation and new media have attracted increased attention as art forms. Since the popularity of the young British artists, the rise of 'Brit Art' and the controversy of the Turner Prize, painting has taken a back seat. Damien Hirst was famously quoted as saying that painting was dead. Housley, however works with traditional materials, proving that painting is alive and has an energy and power of its own in today’s art world. His paintings play with our notions of taste, finding novelty in cliché and lyricism in mundane, blank objects like sports bags and light bulbs.