Born in Worcester, England in 1949, Martin Gale moved to Ireland as a child and studied at Newbridge College. He studied drawing and fine art painting at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. He is a member of Aosdána and was elected a member of the RHA in 1996. In 2013, Martin was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Art from NUI Maynooth. He continues to live and work in County Kildare. Martin Gale uses a hyper-realist style in his paintings often featuring individuals isolated in the landscape. They are executed with a great attention for detail. This realist style coupled with his subject matter of Irish rural life give Gale’s work a timeless quality, which could be from just about any time from the twentieth or twenty-first century. Both of the paintings in the Kildare County Council Municipal Collection have unusual compositional framing: in ‘Watch Him Go’ the figure referred to in the title takes a background place to the central focal point, his jacket; similarly, in ‘Cross Country’ the cross country runners are compositionally secondary to the geese that dominate the foreground.
Martin Gale - Cross Country
