Tom Mead CBBP

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Tom Mead is a London based figurative artist, whom following graduating from a BA in Fine Art in 2019, has had work exhibited in many UK galleries and has been part of prestigious painting competitions.

Mead won the London Graphc Centre Prize 2023, was a finalist of Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year 2019, and has made the shortlist for the Ruth Borchard Self portrait Prize three times. Notable commissioned sitters include Theo Faberge, Professor Green, jazzy B, Laura Linney, Axel Ruger, Sarah Healey, and Courtney Pine. Tom is also a member of the Contemporary British Portrait Painters.

His practice is an ongoing exploration of existentialism and saudade through the lens of working class adulthood. Visuals and ideology from childhood find themselves juxtaposed with a truer life, where a naively built clay figure can live alongside the manifested dread of unaffordable housing. Thus marriage of influences creates an uncanny imagery that leaves the viewer with a warped, melancholy sense of nostalgia, the feeling of time slipping by and control being lost, a reminder of innocence and the nauseating feeling that comes with acknowledging its loss or corruption.

The process Mead has developed harkens back to a childhood obsession with miniatures, stop motion and cardboard construction. Crude sets are created, with printed cut outs of figures and objects. These scenes are then painted to blur the distinction between scale, flatness, realism and space.