Talbot is a figurative artist , his life drawings are edgy and sometimes uncomfortable, collaborations between himself and his model. His paintings however, are pure invention.. light, movement and tension.. he’s an anatomist, inventing the figure, moving it in his head and on the canvas, visualising the movements and changes as he works, capturing light where it is, was, and where it’s going to be.

He’s an artist’s artist.. his latest solo show at Chi Gallery in Brooklyn, NY,  attracted artists from literally all corners of the US.

While he is best known for his figurative works on canvas and paper, Talbot continues to develop and extend his body of work in other mediums, most notably his latest ‘transition’ series of litho-based monotypes.

He is currently working on an awareness project, using paintings, graphics, mixed media and sculptures as a visual reaction to male control and conditioning, in particular FGM (female genital mutilation).
A US touring programme for the project is being planned by Chi Gallery Director, Tracy Causey-Jeffery. 

Talbot has been working for a year on a series of large life-drawings, upto five feet by four. A large format, studio-produced book of these drawings is planned for the new year.

A mixed media print collaboration with Australian figurative artist, Dawn Devereux, is in progress, the resulting show will be shared between both studios with video of the Brisbane studio showing in Talbot’s and vice versa.

The first thing you see in the canvases of Bill Talbot is that he loves, above all, the female body in its prime. Not for him the heavy, sagging, aged and misshapen forms of so much contemporary nude portraiture. "Hang reality," he seems to be saying, "Yes, we do grow old: all the more reason to find joy in lithe and youthful forms" Talbot's subjects include ballet dancers -in motion and at ease athletic-looking nudes in water, and a range of slender and elongated young women whose gaze is invariably calm, somber, mysterious, even inscrutable, and whose wholebody pose often defies description.

In Falling Figure... is the girl kneeling, or lying down, or falling onto a cushion of air, or all of these at once? Does her face express ecstatic acceptance, or taut resistance? We are never sure, but in Talbot's hands such ambiguities are never uncomfortable or unsettling -they merely intrigue.

Talbot rarely gives his nudes a setting. Most of these bodies exist in a no-man's-land of dark space (a man's imagination perhaps?) through which their flesh glimmers as if lit from within. Their shadowy faun-like limbs suggest creatures of fantasy, yet they live and breathe too. In the surface sheen of flesh we are never allowed to forget the subtle workings of bone and muscle beneath. This is achieved by the repeated overlaying and rubbing down of paint surfaces, arriving at a colour that is both muted and luminous, and a depth of texture that allows for superb moulding of curves. The underwater figures of the Nymphs series take human flesh one step towards abstraction by viewing its surfaces through the water of a lily pond, seen from above. The bodies are dappled, distorted, half-hidden in the depths, yet we know they are bodies in motion because in every case one small body part (an elbow, part of a hand) breaks the surface film of the water like an amphibian coming up for air.