It’s Not Unusual

Original oil on canvas, framed - £1,200
High resolution dibond aluminium print 42x28 inches - £600

This portrait of Tom Jones stands as a defining work within the artist’s practice.

Rendered in oil with bold, fractured brushwork and deep chiaroscuro, the painting captures Tom Jones as presence rather than celebrity — a figure emerging from darkness, shaped by time, experience, and survival. The composition rejects surface likeness in favour of psychological weight, allowing texture, abrasion, and layered colour to carry the narrative.

The eyes form the still centre of the work: alert, resilient, and unflinching. Around them, warm flesh tones collide with bruised reds, ash whites, and heavy blacks, echoing a life lived under intensity — fame, excess, reinvention — without collapse. Every mark holds tension between control and instinct, refinement and rawness.

This is not a nostalgic portrait. It is a study of endurance.

For the artist, this painting represents a moment of complete alignment between technique and intent — a benchmark piece that continues to define the direction and ambition of all subsequent portrait work. It remains, by his own measure, the strongest painting he has produced.