If some artists are born and others made, Tom Glynn is undoubtedly one of the former. Growing up in West Sussex in the 1950s and 60s, he possessed a voracious aesthetic sensibility from the start. Not long after beginning at school, aged five, he spent the best part of a week constructing an elaborate tunneled structure in a sandpit – astonishing his teachers in the process. In subsequent years he fashioned animals from plasticine, made assemblages from scavenged wood, sketched on scraps of paper, and built miniature model theatres. As he grew older, Glynn became interested in earlier artists, establishing what he has called a ‘lifelong friendship’ with the work of Picasso, Matisse, Arp and Brancusi. But his ambitions to become a serious artist himself only crystallized at the age of fifteen, when he visited the studio of the great post-war British sculptor, Robert Adams. Glynn even showed the older artist some of his own creations, which Adams is said to have admired.
