Meet The Maker: Michael Burton

25 November 2011

In memory of Michael Burton, who sadly passed away earlier this year, we are reprinting the interview Tom Bowtell carried out wth the hugely talented craftsman dubbed “the best silversmith in England” by the esteemed curator and critic Graham Hughes.

Michael Burton would not be offended if I described him as an authentic English eccentric. He and I had communicated via phone and letter for nearly three years before finally meeting in person and in that time Michael had already charmed and intrigued me with fascinating emails such “Hi Thos, the goil wots doing the web thingy is showing me what to do on the confuser.”*

Meeting Mr Burton in the flesh was no disappointment. As the photos accompanying this article will confirm, Michael is in possession of one of the most resplendent moustaches this side of Tom Selleck. His language is peppered with florid and poetic asides, he breaks out into song at regular intervals and his anecdotes spiral dizzingly out of control as what he calls his “butterfly mind” tugs his imagination that way and this.

When I meet him at the impossibly picturesque Crewkerne railway station in rural Somerset, his car is perched precariously upon a hillock. “The starter motor is broken… we’ll have to fix it later, so I’m starting it on a hill… easier than pushing.” One of the highlights of my day’s tour of Michael’s rural world is to be the constant quest to find suitable slopes to stop his Volvo on. On a couple of occasions it almost seems as if Michael is deciding to stop simply because he has found a suitable slope from which to start again, rather than for any more tangible reason.

Once we have arrived at our first destination, Michael’s workshop at the back of Scotts’ Nursery in the village of Merriott, I take out my dictaphone to record our conversation. Michael instantly leaps into life: “Oh I’ve got one of those if that breaks down. Because I’ll often think of a song as I’m going along in the car. Yes, I think Out To Lunch came about that way” Then, without pausing for breath, Michael launches into an a capella rendition aforementioned song “Out to lunch, out to lunch, the whole ruddy universe is out to lunch. Look in the mirror and here comes the crunch, the person staring back at you is out to lunch.”

If these introductory anecdotes confirm Michael as an instinctive entertainer, charmer (“I must admit I’m a natural tart”) and raconteur, this innate larkiness should not disguise that Michael is a serious artist. “Oddly enough, I’ve only realised quite recently that underneath it all I can’t escape from the fact that I’m a bloody artist. This is fairly appalling because it means you’ve never got any time for yourself, even if it’s 2am and you really need to get to sleep.” From an outsider’s perspective, Michael’s status as an artist has surely never been in doubt: he is a painter, poet and dancer as well as a musician and, of course, a goldsmith. In conversation, Michael is utterly unable to hide his love of beautiful things. As we rummage through the drawers of his workshop we come across sketches he has made of things which stirred him – a corner of a room here, a square of cracked pavement there – and even as he looks at the decades-old sketches he is once again overcome as he remembers the objects which inspired them: “Ooh that’s a lovely room, a medieval room in Muchelney – I just love the squareness of this bit while all the other walls are skew-whiff, gorgeous!”

As one might expect, the workshop is bursting with precious gold and silver (and bronze and copper and ivory and brass and wooden) objects which are the result of Michael’s 35 years as a professional silversmith. In addition to this, there are a host of well thumbed and fascinating books, approximately 37 different wrist watches (“Yes, I rather like watches”), a whole family of hats and an extensive library of much-loved compilation music cassettes.

Nearer the front of his workshop, Michael’s objects are arranged with rather more decorum, and the pieces on display show the breadth of Michael’s silversmithing talents. Alongside bowls and candlesticks which demonstrate the quality of his classical craftsmanship are a number of pieces which underline the more experimental and avant-garde areas his work has explored (each of them distinguished by Michael’s trademark carving brilliance). Michael is a goldsmith who undertakes the entire creation process, from the initial design to the prototyping to the making itself and, as his Who’s Who entry reveals, his work ranges from jewellery, to sculpture, to accurately scaled model helicopters.

One of Michael’s most distinctive works is what he calls his “Plump Ladies Chess Set” (pictured right with a grinning Mr Burton). When I ask Michael about how the design for the chess set came about, he launches into a typical bout of circumlocution, touching on numerous topics, including Gilbert and George’s live art interventions in the 60s, before finally reaching a conclusion: “I came up with an idea for the new design of the Bristol Art Guild badge ands I decided to do the Three Graces – any excuse to draw naked women – and the idea grew from there.”

Warming to his subject, Michael is now rifling through his drawers, showing me successive generations of his Plump Ladies, each one somewhat plumper than the last. “So after doing the Three Graces I thought ‘let’s just give them slightly chubbier thighs’, so I added some wax to the moulds to make them slightly rounder down the bottom.” Once the various prototypes have been laid out on the table, the artistic evolution of the pieces is clear to see, from the relatively demure thighs and posteriors of the early pieces to the gloriously curvaceous creations which people his chess board.

Michael freely admits that he didn’t set out to create these uniquely-proportioned ladies, but that he just “saw something” and developed the pieces using instinct and trial and error. “It was Michelangelo, I think, who said ‘I can see the object inside’ and I feel a bit like that: I’ve got a lump of square metal but I can see the thing inside and it’s just a matter of going chip chop and letting it out. People always go ‘arghh, how can you do that?’, but the answer is that you feel as if you are just exposing what is there.”

Michael then proceeds to demonstrate his carving technique, holding a tiny piece of silver inches from his face and then carving with startling deftness. His carving technique briefly resembles a concerto violinist in full flow. Michael admits that the fact that he is rather shortsighted is actually a benefit for his carving, as it allows him to see tiny pieces in great detail when he holds them close. In this particular instance, Michael is expertly sharpening the miniscule tusks on tiny silver pig; of which more later.

This carving method is illustrative of the individuality and idiosyncrasy that is utterly integral to Michael’s work. “It’s not that I rebel, it’s just that I can’t be bothered to do things the way people say they should be done. If it works, I’ll do it, but if I can find another way of doing it, then I’ll do that. So I’ve always gone with my take on things.”

Perhaps inevitably this not-entirely-reverential approach to traditional methodology occasionally got Michael Burton into hot water while he was training at Sir John Cass between 1969 and 1973. Michael mischievously admits that in order to meet the requirements of his tutors, he would often draw his initial planning designs once the object itself had already been made. Even when he did make a design at the start, he managed to court controversy: “I remember that once we had to make a beaker and I designed a perfect cylinder, and someone came up to me and said ‘Jack Stapely [the head tutor] doesn’t like your perfect cylinder because you’ve got to hammer it up out of a flat sheet of metal. You’ve only got three days to make it and he says there’s no way you can hammer up a perfect cylinder in that time.’ He said it should be seamed up, but I said: ‘No, I’ve been doing it for four years I know what I can do, if I don’t do it then he can fail me.’ I was pretty pi**ed off because he’d already tried to throw me out two or three times because I also had very long hair at the time…So to cut a long story short [that’s not like you, Michael], I knocked it up, and it was a perfect cylinder and it was perfectly upright and polished and I think that in the end even Jack Stapely had to give me full marks.”

I sense that the pride with which Michael recounts this tale has two sources: on the one hand, he is celebrating the vindication of his individual approach, while on the other (although he probably wouldn’t admit it) eventually earning the approval of the Establishment is clearly something he valued. Similarly, while I believe Michael when he says that he had no interest in going to see his final marks at Sir John Cass (“I’d learned how to be a silversmith, that was why I went”) he cannot disguise a small grin when he grudgingly admits that he was actually awarded a diploma with distinction.

If I were a psychologist (which I’m not) I might suggest that complex relationship Michael has with the Establishment (rejecting its constraints, while enjoying its approval) could be traced to the fact that his father never provided him with any encouragement in pursuing a career as an artist. “My father didn’t want me to be an artist, so when I said that it was what I was going to do, he said ‘Well do bloody art then’, and that was one of the last times he spoke to me.” Michael speaks unabashedly about his relationship with his father, and, with typical cheeriness, espouses a theory that the relative solitude of his childhood allowed his imagination the time and opportunity to flourish into the strange and fascinating beast it is today.

Cod-psychology aside, there is no doubt that Michael speaks very fondly about the support he was given at Sir John Cass by one of his tutors, the silversmith Reg Hill: “Reg was really good to me. I once asked him to explain to me about triangulation and proportions and technical things and he said: ‘No, I’m not going to tell you this because when you do something you do it and it works out anyway and if I try and teach you anything I’ll probably mess that ability up.’ And I think he gave me a lot of marks for my design work, because he liked what I did. I guess it was Reg Hill who gave me confidence to do things my own way at a time when I wasn’t really sure of myself.”

When Michael himself became a teacher, (he worked for several years as a tutor at Yeovil College), he based his approach on that of Reg Hill: “I think that there are certainly skills and disciplines which you can learn and be taught. When I taught, what I tried to do was provide the kids with the confidence let their creativity out. I genuinely think that there’s an artist inside everyone, it’s just that people are sometimes too afraid of messing things up. It’s one of the things I love about silver: it’s really hard to mess it up, you can always solder on another piece of silver or bash it back.”

Michael is also realistic enough to admit that having considerable natural talent, and a strong sense of independence, doesn’t necessarily translate into financial security. When I congratulate him on his steadfastly independent approach, he says “I’m not always sure if it is such a good thing, I do things my way, but I never seem to make any bloody money.” Later, when I ask whether he has applied for the modern-day Goldsmiths’ Fair, (he was an integral part of its forerunner, Loot), he says, bluntly “no, I’m absolutely dreadful at getting that sort of thing organised.”

This is one of the few occasions when Michael’s ebullience dwindles, and, not for the first time, I get the impression that he feels somewhat alienated from some of the more commercial aspects of the silversmithing world. This suspicion is confirmed when, a few days after my visit, Michael phones me to reiterate a few points, asserting the reason for his artistic choices with uncharacteristic precision: “I just looked through the Goldsmiths’ Review, and I saw that there is lots of very shiny, polished stuff. Now that looks lovely, and I did that for a while and worked at mastering architectural precision, but for me, what interests me is capturing the reality of objects. I like the roughness in the work of Albrecht Dürer so the houses I carve onto rings are tumble-down like the originals, and the pigs I make are rough and ready, because that’s how pigs are. My things are skew-whiff and wobbly because I like them that way.”

Michael is once again defending his unwillingness to sacrifice his artistic instinct in order to maximise the commercial viability of his work, or receive accolades from the Establishment. Interestingly enough, the pigs which he mentions, may offer him a path to happy compromise: Michael has been interested in pigs since spending time as a child on his grandmother’s farm and pig motifs crop up in his sketch books from an early age. He is currently creating a whole range of exquisite minute silver pigs engaged in a whole array of activities including playing the violin, driving a tractor and riding a motorbike. The unique appeal of these pigs is their combination of realistic detail (“this one here’s a British Lop because I chopped his ears off to make 'em loppy”) and minute size (“the smallest pigs sit easily on the nail of the little finger”). It is clear that Michael’s innate genius for carving, allied with his short-sightedness means that he, and possibly he alone, is able to conjure these highly collectible porcine delights, meaning that they might just afford financial returns without impinging on his artistic explorations.

But Michael, being Michael, is going about the marketing of his pigs in his own inimitable fashion: “What I want to do over the next few months is that I want to get these pigs on motorbikes down to the Ace Café in London, where all the bikers go. I’ve got a pig on a Triumph, a pig on an Indian. Did I tell you about the six foot long doll’s house model of an 11th Century Monastry in wood I made? Funnily enough, the person who owns that monastery now was at school with me, he’s the bloke who does all the musicals, not Lloyd-Webber,  Cameron Mackintosh, yes that’s him, have you ever...”

And with that, the butterfly mind of Mr Michael Burton takes flight again, heading cheerily off down another charming anecdotal alleyway. I know he will get back to the point he was making about the pigs eventually, but until he does, I’m content to sit back and listen.

To view and purchase the works of Michael Burton (including the famous pigs), please click here to visit his newly-revamped website. To view Michael’s entry on Who’s Who in Gold and Silver, please click here.

*Email translates as: “Hi Tom, the girl who's doing the website is showing me how to use the computer.”