David Williams-Ellis is a world-renowned sculptor and artist who was a student of eminent octogenarian drawing teacher, Nerina Simi.
His exhibitions are proudly displayed at Perthshire’s Scone Palace, Aberdeen’s Maritime Museum and the IFC Building in Shanghai, though Williams-Ellis is perhaps most famously known for his commission of the Normandy Memorial Trust’s D-Day Sculpture which was unveiled by French President Emmanuel Macron and then-British Prime Minister Theresa May in 2019.
Here, Williams-Ellis reveals his own journey, plus how he created the statue of three of Manchester City’s greatest ever players…
“I was really lucky. As a child, I was surrounded by artists,” he says.
“My great uncle was an architect who created Port Merrion in Wales; my sister was an artist - and both my parents could have been artists, but the Second World War meant they ended up doing other things and taking on normal jobs.
“As a child I was always messing around with plasticine, clay, and sand – I was always making things and I was lucky to have an art master who asked, ‘why don’t you try sculpture?’
“I was lucky because I spent a lot of time – too much time – on my sculpture work, while my other academic work struggled along.
“My art master completely adopted me and was giving me all of his private time because I think he recognised I had a three-dimensional understanding of things.
“I left school and decided not to go to art school and went to Italy instead because I wanted to do figurative techniques and I didn’t think the art schools would teach me what I wanted to learn.
“I went to the esteemed Nerina Simi art studio in Florence and kept going each day until she let me in!
“I was allowed to join the class and spent a year drawing there and working with woodcarvers, creating these huge carvings of various eminent people.
“The experience was amazing, and I realised I was seeing things in people’s faces I’d never seen previously as I walked down the street - things that I hadn’t been able to see six months before.
“I was working continually on charcoal drawings every day, and it trained my eye.
“I returned to the UK aged around 19, and realised I needed more help, and I discovered a scholarship from Canada that allowed me to go back to Italy for 18 months and learn marble carving at a place where all the great renaissance artists got their marble from.
“I was surrounded by sculptors from around the world, all older and more experienced than I was, and I learnt a lot from that period, including the fact that I wasn’t really a carver because when I made things, I’d inevitably want to change them, so I focused on other materials.
“I started working with clay and bronze, but I had to learn about casting. I was able to work for a couple of hours a week in a bronze foundry in Italy.
“As there weren’t many young Italian sculptors at the time, they were very keen for those who were interested to learn their trade, so they gave me a lot of space and time, and I gradually learned the process.
“When I returned to England, I started to work almost exclusively with bronze.
“Sculpture is a very expensive pastime, because of the materials and equipment you need and the space you need to work in.
“I had my first exhibition in Paris after leaving Italy and I was lucky enough to sell two bronzes and never really looked back from there – people really wanted my work, and I was really lucky that was the case.
“I hope the statue I’ve made for Manchester City is one that people will really enjoy – it’s been part of my life for the last two years and it could become one of those pieces that I will miss, but you can’t keep things you love – they have got to get out.
“As a sculptor, you have to move on and you create these things for other people, not yourself.
“A lot of my work has a lot of sport in it in that there’s a lot of movement in it as you try and capture the pace and movement of things.
“I love what I do and I’m passionate about what I do, and I want to be able to give something for other people to enjoy.
“What excited me about this project was that they were three iconic figures that I grew up with.
“I was only very young when they came to prominence, and I had cigarette cards with Bell, Lee and Summerbee on when I was 10 or 11.
“This is the first football project I’ve worked on and it’s been very exciting and I hope I’ve captured the essence of all three of these legendary players.
“It’s a celebration of their lives and their achievements at Manchester City.
“I didn’t want to do something gimmicky or kitsch - I needed capture the essence of each player because it’s rare in football you get three players close together.
“Colin Bell has this balletic athleticism that is extraordinary - it’s almost as if his body is suspended under the arms and his body moves, almost as though he is a puppet.
“Then there was the pugnacious enthusiasm of Franny Lee and the way he is straight in there, because he was a hard player.
“I wanted to capture the jocularity, skill and endeavour of Mike Summerbee and his determination to get past people – and I wanted to include all those attributes for all three.
“My research was a lot of very pixelated black and white films and not-so-good photos from the 1970s, all so I could see their highlights and moments and I needed to capture all the traits I mentioned coming through.
“They needed to be three individuals that also worked together because they were the characters that led that wonderful team.
“The families and the club helped me with photographs, and I did a lot of research on the Internet to get everything as close to how each of the players were in real life.
“When I went to the Etihad, the sheer scale of the stadium and the stands made it clear that the statue had to be larger than life sized and raised up, to give it a presence.
“The figures are nine feet tall on a 165cm plinth and I think they’ll work really well.
“What I really want to achieve is that when people see the statues, they take a sharp intake of breath, and the same the next time they see it and the same again and again…
“I hope they see something different each time because that’s what great sculpture does.
“It’s a celebration of the team of that era and its success – it’s also about a sense of history because we need to know our past, because that’s so important.
“Hopefully it will have a place in the Etihad’s history and that people get something from it – if it achieves that, I’ll be very happy.”
