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Madame Talbot's FAQ
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Who is Madame Talbot?
Madame Talbot is a rather private and reclusive self-taught artist who has always been
interested in the dark and strange, even as a wee kidlet. Her interest include just about
anything that has to do with the Victorian era 19th century, she has a fascination with
Victorian era drugs, apothecary, and specifically those of absinthe, opium, laudanum, ether, etc.
She has always loved the Addams Family cartoons as well as the original black and white TV show
and watched it as well as the Munsters when she was a kid. Sadly though, she was not allowed to
watch Dark Shadows as her mother thought it might give her nightmares. Her favorite illustrators
are Edward Gorey, Thomas Nast and Posada - just to name a few - and her favorite cartoonist,
Robert Crumb who she has the privilege of meeting when he dropped by her studio while he was
visiting in Seattle.
Madame Talbot also has a morbid fascination with Victorian death rituals and mourning techniques,
medical antiques, blood letting, and loves visiting old cemeteries and graveyards. She loves
watching Civil War re-enactments is always researching the past as that is her main source of
inspiration.
Her favorite ghost story has always been The Bell Witch of Tennessee and loves Southern Gothic,
Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley's Bluegrass and Robert Johnson's Delta Blues at the crossroads.
She is fond of dusty tomes, attic findings, forgotten basements and gallows humor and would one
day like to visit Bunhill Fields and Highgate cemetery. She has the luxury of living across the
street from a very old church, and can watch the funeral processions from her window. She loves
walking by the funeral homes on her street, and is interested in anything death oriented, past,
present and future.
Madame Talbot is self-taught in nearly everything she does, from painting, pen-and-ink
illustration, framed curio exhibits, her handmade mourning and apothecary cloth dolls,
tattooing, her limited edition handmade books and even web design. She also is well versed
in the art of penmanship and calligraphy, and is a taphophile by nature and historian by design.
The authors she most admires are Charles Baudelaire, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe,
Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs,
whom she had the wonderful opportunity of not only meeting and corresponding with, but also to
collaborate with by illustrating one of his stories for her third book, "Rapture."
Her beliefs are firmly rooted in what is now known as the dark aesthetic, and she considers are
work very dark art, which a decade ago might have been termed gothic. Certain artists have this
same dark aesthetic such as Francisco Goya, William Hogarth, E. Hyacinthe Langlois,
and Hieronymous Bosch.
Her politics and ideals come from the readings and rantings of the Dadaist, Surrealist,
Man Ray, Kiki's Paris on up to the French Situationists and finally ending with the punk
movement of the late 1970s and very early 1980s.
She moved to the Oregon Coast after living in Seattle for 15 years, and now lives in her very
own Victorian-era House which was built around the 1870s and is reputed to be haunted.
In fact, nearly every house in this small Victorian town is thought to be haunted, especially
considering that this is the oldest town west of the Mississippi, established in 1811.
She lives behind which used to be Mortician's Row, and across from the old Hospital where there
is a ghost who currently resides in the basement morgue. Bones from old graveyards have been
recently un-earthed on the street that she lives on, and surrounding her house is patches of
old graveyard. She feels her that entire backyard is one big graveyard. She is a taphophile
of the first order.
She has always had in interest in strange crimes from the Victorian era, specifically
Jack the Ripper, H. H. Holmes, Mrs. Maybrick, Lizzie Borden, and ending with Bonnie & Clyde in
the 1920s.
She has always been fascinated with sideshow, dime museums, oddities, pickled things and jarred
specimens, the macabre, shrunken heads and books bound in human skin, the photographer
Joel-Peter Witkin, medical curiosities and anomalies, the smell of Victorian Morgues.
There has always been a fascination with European folk-lore and the American vampires of Rhode
Island, specifically Mercy Brown and the eating of burnt human heart as a medicinal cure for
vampirism, as well as other type of consumption of human body parts, such as powdered mummy
and the magical properties of the blood from one who had been executed.
Madame Talbot's last name came from the famous and notorious necromancer and alchemist,
Edward Kelly alias Edward Talbot. He was the one who exerted so great an influence upon
Dr. John Dee that he and Dee left England in search of occult and alchemical adventures.
John Dee and Edward Kelly had once evoked the dead in a lonely cemetery. Kelly died in 1597.
Madame Talbot's signature, which she has used since 1984 is the alchemical symbol for air.
She studies the symbology of Victorian secret societies, and read the diaries of
Cotton Mathers, Judge Sewall and Samuel Pepys, and has been intrigued by the years 1666
(The Black Plague) and 1698 (The Salem Witchcraft Trial) and 1888 (Jack the Ripper).
She has a passion for old velvet, odd stump dolls, outsider art and the Oregon Coast. She collects
poison labels, broken doll heads and scary antiques. She is always interested in Victorian poison
gardens and proper tea rituals, milk first or last?
She has also been working on a Victorian Death Book (VDB) for the last three years which she is
writing and will illustrate with her own unique style. She still has quite a ways to go on it,
but nothing excites her more than working on her death related projects.
What is Victorian Lowbrow&trade?
Vic·to·ri·an Low·brow
Pronunciation: (vik-'tOr-E-n lbrou)
adj.
1. Of, relating to, or belonging to the period of the reign of Queen Victoria and being uncultivated; vulgar; characteristic of a person who is not cultivated or does not have intellectual tastes.
2. Being in the highly ornamented, massive style of architecture, decor, and furnishings popular in 19th-century England while at the same time being quite immoral for the higher classes i.e. local pub, dime museum, brothel,
sideshow, music halls.
n. A person belonging to or exhibiting characteristics typical of the Victorian period
having uncultivated tastes, wanting instead to associate with all aspects of an uncouth
lower class society.
The Victorian Era was not only about Royalty, the Gentry and Upper Crust High Society,
but also about the lower working classes whose tastes were more than a little
less refined, if not even downright coarse. Victorian Lowbrow&trade would be defined in terms of:
Sideshows and the Elephant Man, Victorian era tattooed ladies, strange medical exhibits,
dime museums and East End shows, the cult of death and the funeral rituals of the lower
classes, pubs, bars and saloons, public executions, titillating scandals involving death
and betrayal, morbid legends such as Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden, the penny dreadful,
Victorian drugs such as Opium dens, Absinthe rituals & Wormwood deliriums, Morphine
syringes sold to High Society women, Chloral Hydrate fiends, Laudanum addicts,
Secret Hashish Societies, laughing gas parties, and patent medicines. Also drinking one's cups,
cocktails and grogs, Coach Inns and Night Houses, smoking pipes and cigarettes,
morbid little jump rope songs, violent Punch and Judy puppet shows, Penny gaffs,
the resurrectionists, graveyard picnics, and etc.
But most importantly, the term Victorian Lowbrow&trade was coined specifically to describe the
amazing one-of-a-kind dark art of Madame Talbot's work and the phrase "Victorian Lowbrow&trade" is a trademark
of Madame Talbot's Victorian Lowbrow&trade.
What creative items is Madame Talbot working on now?
As of this writing, she is currently working on her Victorian Mourning Dolls, and once
those are completed and up on the web site (around November or December), she will get back
to drawing more posters.
Madame Talbot has a reputation for being pretty reclusive.
Can you tell me what is up with that?
She didn't used to be so reclusive. For many years she lived with about a dozen or so
artists in downtown Seattle. It was non-stop hectic all the time, and frankly
she just got burned out and craves the solitude of living near the Oregon Coast.
She has been posting juicy bits of life in Seattle during those hectic years
from a piece she cobbled together called "Belltown Gothic" circa 1980s-1990s.
Is it true that Madame Talbot sleeps all day and stay up all hours of the night?
Yes, this is true.
Can you tell me more about Madame Talbot's Victorian Mourning dolls?
Madame Talbot has been making cloth rag type dolls all her life, but only really began her line of
Victorian Lowbrow&trade Mourning Dolls while living in Seattle back in 1992. She does not use a sewing
machine -- everything is sewn by her own hands, using only a needle and thread.
She also wanted to make the dolls as safe as possible so she chose not to use oil paints
because certain hues -- especially true cadmium -- are highly toxic,
especially around pets (even when the paint is dry!). Acrylic paint mimics the
look of oil paint very well and it is a good medium for the dolls. Besides the fact
that it's less toxic, the other positive advantage of acrylic over oil is that
the paint dries much more quickly. And it suits her style of working.
Madame Talbot has many different styles of Victorian Lowbrow&trade Mourning Dolls,
many even have handmade costumes which were all made by hand. The material she uses is
always vintage: old velvets, brocades, lace and antique buttons. She does not enlist the use of
any "helpers" or machine assistance; this is her own solitary creative adventure.
You can be certain that each doll was made entirely by Madame Talbot from start to finish.
None of these dolls will be made into "reproductions." Each doll is an original,
signed and dated by Madame Talbot.
Will Madame Talbot still be making her Victorian Lowbrow&trade posters/art prints?
Absolutely! She loves to draw and goes just a bit crazy when she cannot get the time to draw.
But Madame Talbot also likes to take on a different big projects like creating dolls, working
on framed curio exhibits, painting coffins, and other fun stuff. As always, she never use the
computer with any of her posters, from start to finish they are created entirely with
pen-and-ink hand drawn on illustration board.
Does Madame Talbot sell any of her original art?
Yes, we have lots of great small pieces of original artwork that are for sale on
the website. These are early pieces from when she did limited edition glorified
comic books.
Is Madame Talbot's work currently in any galleries?
She does not actively pursue having work in galleries. Madame Talbot is not of the temperament
or personality to attend art openings.
Can I write to Madame Talbot?
You can her at:
BrennanDalsgard AT gmail.com or you can snail mail her at:
Brennan Dalsgard Publishers
Attn: Ashleigh Talbot
P.O. Box 363
Astoria, Oregon, 97103
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