Ralph Douglas and Martin Sloss

About

Ralph Douglas and Martin Sloss share a love of, and a great talent for, paint and painting. Their skill and expertise with paint and brush is immediately evident when looking at their work. Although their styles differ greatly, they are both concerned with real life imagery, and they both interpret real life very differently through composition, colour palette and mark making.

Ralph, who has in recent years become partially sighted, works extremely close up to his canvas, in order to properly see what colours and marks he is making. The result is delicate, beautiful and expressive. It is not uncommon to feel a sense of peace and serenity when looking at Ralph’s work. His expressive brush strokes accumulate, not in a dense way, but in a light gestural way, pulling the image out of the canvas only where necessary.

Martin works from photographs and paints with unusual yet harmonious chromatic reality. Plentiful amounts of thick paint give Martin's paintings an object-like quality, repeating compositional formats that show only part of the picture or scene. The brightness and sharpness of his colour palette give each of his compositions a vivid freshness that draws in the eye.