Willesden Junction, London, is not a particularly pretty place. It wasn’t in 1966, when Leon Kossoff painted Willesden Junction, Summer No. 1, and it’s not now. Overwhelmingly brown—a sprawling intersection of converging train tracks into a vast expanse of metal, rust, stones, and dirt—it is industrial and unlovely. Kossoff, however, his brush loaded with paint, rendered this place strangely beautiful and thick with optimism. The impasto has the tactile qualities of physical handling which gives a strong sense of the built environment, but it is also the screaming peacock blueness of the sky, on a warm summer’s day, which the artist has rendered as a physical presence too. Surprising blue dashes and stripes come down from the sky to mingle with the mess of drab blacks and browns below, a melange of trains, tracks, and platforms at the city’s fringe. “The Mystery of Appearance” at Haunch of Venison, curated by Catherine Lampert, is a “conversational” exhibition between ten British post-war painters. The show is a subtle repositioning of what was in 1976—to some negative effect—proclaimed a “School of London,” by R.B. Kitaj, to corral together a set of painters who concentrated on figuration while minimalism and abstraction dominated critical attention. It …