Their impact is immediate.

But it's not the subject of the pictures that first strikes you. It's their mood: strange, mostly unsettling and, the longer you study them, the more powerfully sensed.

This is probably because these pictures find their beginnings less in the visible facts that lie in front of the painter than in some hidden realm of never-quite-pindownable feeling; in a world of instinct, sensuality and emotion which, slowly discovering a form in the work, lead both looker and painter into a deeper involvement and maybe also, through that, towards clarity.

Take Solana, for instance (pictured, below). A woman squats down on the grass before a small wooden house. The light that falls from its window picks out the reds and purples of her clothes, the orange yellows of the clapboard, the blue greens of lush plants. The colours glow eerily amid the encroaching dark. A single figure stands, waiting, in the background. A solitary watcher, a scary intruder, a guardian, an alter ego, a ghost? It's anyone's guess. But the frisson is felt.

Alex Merritt painted this picture, he explains, at a time of great turmoil. His wife was extremely ill. Another family member had just died in the most difficult circumstances. He himself had been forced to move at short notice from his New Jersey studio. Loading whatever he could fit into his car, he had driven across the country to an aunt's house in California, only to find that the “Sunshine State” was in ferment. Protests arising from the killing of George Floyd by a police officer had erupted into uprisings.

This painting is not specifically about any single person or situation or scene, explains Merritt. In fact, the only “real” thing in the picture is a little dog that stares out of the window. That was actually there. But what Merritt was trying to capture was a sense of how it feels to be crouching there, alone on a dark lawn, gazing out at something that you cannot see, so physically still on the outside and yet vibrating with anxiety within. The meanings that this picture might take on for other people will shift, he suggests. But its peculiar atmosphere, at once so calm and so tense, will remain. It drifts into the mind like a shadow. And the spectator feels it as surely as a sunbather feels the chill on their skin when a cloud crosses suddenly across the face of the sun.

Right from the beginning, says Merritt, his work has been about dealing with internal conflict. He only discovered painting when he was in his late twenties and in therapy, undergoing treatment for addiction, not to mention the trauma of a chaotic childhood that had eventually caught up with him. “I painted a picture and this really nice nurse told me that it reminded her of Guernica,” he says. “I didn't even know what she meant so the next day she brought me a print-out. I can't pretend that my attempt was really very much like Picasso. The nurse was just being kind. But it was that which first started me looking.”

After a few years working as a labourer on construction sites, he was injured and so forced into a change of career. By then he knew that he wanted to be a painter - “it felt like a way that I could relate to the world” - and he had some idea of the sort of work that he wanted to make, but he hadn't got the skills. So he enrolled at various colleges and eventually, a little over three years ago, he emerged with a Masters from the New York Academy of Arts. “I was 37,” he says. “It was late to start. But perhaps that's been good. It's given me a drive.”

“I was 37. It was late to start. But perhaps that's been good. It's given me a drive.”

The works that will be shown through Branch Arts are typical of his output. Some are huge, some are small. The paintings are slowly worked. In some parts their surfaces are thickly textured. Pigments are laid down layer upon overpainted layer; forms are revised and re-revised. In other parts, oils are thinned to translucent sweeps and swashes through which the weave of the canvas can be discerned. His drawings, mixing sharpness and incision with smudges, blurs and erasures, are similarly varied. They may be, individually, quicker to accomplish, but like the paintings they also arise from slow cogitative labours. For every one that is considered of a quality to keep, dozens have been scrumpled and consigned to the rubbish.

“Trying to pull an image out of the void is like trying to remember a dream”

It is this quintessentially responsive, improvisatory quality that endows Merritt's images with their inner life. His struggle is embedded all but literally in his work. The long hours of tension that precede any finished picture are, he believes, as much a part of it as that brief period of “creative bliss when everything swims into focus.”

“Trying to pull an image out of the void” says Merritt, “is like trying to remember a dream.” His subjects are restlessly evasive. They slip from the visual grasp. But then, as images gradually emerge, “its almost like it's not up to me,” he says. “Whatever I make takes on a life of its own.” This new life offers him what he sees as a way of understanding: a sense of connection which brings meaning to what otherwise can feel like a random world.

It's not anything that he wants to make definite. “At a time when art is seen as a commodity, a status symbol; when its value is too often measured in dollars, I want to keep my painting as open-ended as possible,” Merritt says. But he senses when a work is completed because he taps into its atmosphere. His paintings end in that place of feeling from which they first arose.