Tom Glynn FRSA and the Poetics of Juxtaposition: A Modern Classic in British Art

By the Evrima Chicago Editorial Team

"One of the most inventive British artists working today."
 — Dr James Fox, British art historian and broadcaster

To stand before a work by Tom Glynn is to enter a world where the material and the mythical coalesce - where painterly abstraction converses with the physical memory of a land shaped by both time and touch. His art resists confinement. It dances freely between painting and sculpture, between object and idea, between what is seen and what is intuited. Glynn’s practice, steeped in the surrealist legacy of juxtaposition and Dada’s paradoxical playfulness, reshapes our relationship with the very landscapes we thought we knew.

Drawing from found materials and emotional ephemera, Glynn constructs forms that seem simultaneously ancient and contemporary. There is a quiet intelligence in how he layers gesture and texture - a painter’s mark here, a monolithic silhouette there - each suggesting a fragment of narrative caught in the slipstream of memory. Whether in his tactile assemblages or chromatic studies of the British 

countryside, Glynn’s work exudes a visceral response to place, time, and matter. 

One of the recent series,  exhibited under the title Castle on the Hill, exemplifies this ethos. These are not simply landscape interpretations; they are excavations of the spirit embedded in landscape. In Oatfields, for instance, earth-toned textures collide with acrylic vivacity to produce a canvas that feels as much like a remembered walk as a visual artefact. The viewer is not merely invited to look, but to feel - glances, thoughts, and the invisible residue of lived experiences.

Tom Glynn is an established voice in British art, yet his work maintains the sincerity and edge of someone still profoundly in love with the act of creation. His Sussex studio is a crucible of coastal light and ancient echoes, where ideas form slowly and deliberately, like tides shaping stone. Glynn harnesses the chaos of juxtaposed materials with an almost monastic grace, each composition an invitation to pause, reflect, and reimagine.

In the lineage of Britain’s most thoughtful contemporary visual artists, Glynn stands quietly radical. He is not seeking spectacle, but truth - however layered, abstract, or poetic it may appear. In an age obsessed with immediacy, Glynn’s work is a welcome argument for complexity, ambiguity, and the enduring beauty of form.

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All works displayed at the RSA are for sale directly through Tom Glynn’s website : Please contact Tom Glynn FRSA directly via the contact page located at the bottom of the first pages - www.tomglynnfineart.com Additional works available on www.saatchiart.com Tom Glynn FRSA. Book by Dr James Fox, British Art Historian & Broadcaster, titled “Tom Glynn - Paintings Sculptures Assemblages”, ISBN 978-1-3999-3351-3 available from www.booksaboutart.co.uk