The Web Site
This Website presents a selection of original sculpture by Michael James Talbot. All the sculpture featured are of a limited edition in bronze, cast from the original clay sculpture.
Should you wish to acquire any of the artworks shown on this site, an indication of the price for each piece is shown at the bottom of its page. Please see our ‘Acquire Artwork’ page for information to help you.
All measurements are approximate due to the hand made nature of each sculpture.
To contact Michael and his team please go to the Contact Page on this site.
Michael James Talbot
“Sculpture for me, is essentially a theatrical construction, an attempt to show and illuminate a chosen moment in time. I draw my creative inspiration from theatre, myth, dance and illusion. The inspiration for the Briseis and Ariadne sculptures were taken from plumes of water in a night-lit fountain which, with the distortion of the mind’s eye, figures appeared in the tumbling crest of a column of liquid energy. This, I have tried to capture in bronze, through the lost wax process, a technique from Ancient Greece, to render a timeless human narrative from the Myth of Greece. I like to give my sculptures choreography of form, tension and balance to lead the eye and capture a moment in time, sometimes I work with the fragment form rather than an entire figure (like Harlequin and Veil). This is a favourite artistic device often inspired by shadows of the model on the studio wall – because less is sometimes more.”
“I work from the live model in my pursuit of a particular momentary form or gesture. This I contrast with the absolute nature of bronze. It is what remains when time sweeps all else away. When we gaze into the face of an ancient bronze in a museum, what reaches out across the millennia of time is not how different, but how like us they were.”
M. J. Talbot
Michael James Talbot is a British sculptor, born in Staffordshire in the north of England in1959. After completing a BA honours degree in Sculpture, he gained a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Arts in London for post graduate study in 1980, winning the coveted Landseer prize in 1983. He studied further at The Sir Henry Doulton Sculpture School under Colin Melbourne ARCA and Dame Elizabeth Frink RA.
Michael was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1997 and was elected a member of the National Sculpture Society (USA) in 2012. The inspiration for Talbot`s work has always been the human form and its dramatic poetry. It is this, together with his exquisite skills that make his work so individual, intricate and beautiful.
Talbot creates the original clay sculpture which he then casts into bronze, uniquely finishing and patinating each sculpture. This process is wholly under his control allowing him to enhance and refine the final image. The wonder and fascination of sculpture is its ability to be a solid form that can be seen, touched and walked around and yet remain an object of pure spirit.