Merlin James’s painting has both anticipated and influenced certain cryptic, antiheroic trends in much current painting. However, his work is set apart, partly by its highly evolved formal and pictorial concerns and its complex
relationship to tradition and innovation. He engages the viewer with varying degrees of representation and comprehensibility; diversity of structure,
texture, color, and painterly handwriting; play with convention; evocation of mood; control of association and allusion. The borderlines of what we can recognize in (and what we can recognize as) one of his paintings, is
continually tested. Artist's intention and viewer's interpretation are repeatedly put into question, in works which nonetheless hazard meaning, beauty, and an account of human experience of the world.

“I am usually irritated by debates about whether painting in general is alive or dead. But it’s true, in the later decades of the last century a lot of what was offered as new painting felt very stale. When it did look more lively it was often animating the limbs of a cadaver in a puppet-like dance of death.
Why is so much painting either academic or parodic? No doubt
something truly new in art can only come as part of a more general shift of culture and consciousness. Perhaps by trying to make good paintings I’m doing my bit for the revolution. Anyway, I try to make new meaning.”
— Merlin James