Michael Merrill has been making paintings about art in one way or another for over 40 years. Evolving from a series called Paintings About Art, paintings that looked at art and its context. These new paintings look at the actual materials of painting. The subject is the manufacturing of oil paint. The artist visited a factory that makes paint and made 4 large paintings, each one on a different coloured ground – white plus the primary colours, yellow, red and blue. Each painting uses the proceeding painting as the model, and therefore each painting is further removed from the source image. By doing this, each painting, while retaining its subject, becomes more distilled and subject to interpretation and invention. The idea is to explore the choices of colour and tone that are affected by the colour of the ground on a large scale. The paintings emphasize the physical quality of the paint.