3539. New Stadium Road (29)

Tom Miller is an artist I have taken a great deal of interest in ever since I first encountered his unusual surreal pieces in Stokes Croft and in The Bearpit back in 2016. At that time he was still studying his craft at the university, but it was clear that he was creating something rather special. Some of his work is captured in this gallery.

What is most pleasing is that he is now getting a number of commissions and his artwork is appearing on large walls around the city, but he is keeping it real by continuing with his street art work too. This magnificent piece on one of the most prominent walls in Bristol took him a couple of weeks to paint and during that time I stopped to catch up with him.

Tom is genuinely one of the nicest artists I know, he is so modest and always seems to enjoy a bit of a chat. I have to say that I was concerned for his safety when he was painting this, because it was incredibly windy and the scaffold tower was wobbling much more than would have been comfortable. He survived though and what an amazing job he did.

This piece, as you would expect, is so full of colour and detail. Some might call it busy, but I would call it expressive. Lots of body parts combined with flowers and other familiar shapes and objects fill the space, and then there is some respite from this crowded scene to the right of the piece with two less frenetic panels.

The focal point is the face in the middle, and I wonder if it might be a subconscious nod to a piece that stood here for a few years of a large portrait of a girl with a yellow face.

As I said, the two panels on the right offer something different from the rest of the piece, with some landscape and cosmos to calm things down a bot. The far right section reminds me a little bit of the Pink Floyd record sleeve of ‘Dark Side of the Moon. This epic wall is a great addition to Bristol’s iconic street art culture and is one that people leaving the city on the M32 can’t fail to see.