ILLUSTRATION: ASPECTS AND DIRECTIONS
Bob Gill and John Lewis
Bob Gill and John Lewis: ILLUSTRATION: ASPECTS AND DIRECTIONS. London: Studio Vista, 1964. First edition. Slim quarto. Glossy printed wrappers. 96 pp. Fully illustrated with black and white and spot colored examples. Cover illustration by Bob Gill. A fine, unread copy. Rare in this condition.
6.5 x 7.75 softcover book with 96 pages and approx. 85 one- and two-color illustrations. From the book: "Illustration is a lot of things. It can be considered as a work of art or as a visual answer to a specific literary problem. Or it can be both."
Contents
- The camera v. illustration
- Art v. illustration
- The commentator-illustrator
- Illustration was a dirty word . . .
- Line
- Style
- Convention and cliches
- Children's books
- Don't study illustration
Artists include Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ben Shahn, Henri Matisse, Alain F. LeFoll, Ronald Shakespeare, Tomi Ungerer, Pierre Bonnard, Honore Daumier, H. de Toulouse-Lautrec, Max Beerbohm, George Grosz, Oskar Kokoschka, Kathe Kollwitz, Jose Luis Cuevas, Felix Topolski, Robert Weaver, Charles Dana Gibson, Pablo Picasso, Paul Davis, David Hockney, Seymour Chwast, Barbara Nessim, Ronald Searle, Mitlon Glaser, Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh, R. O. Blechman, Edvard Munch, Paul Klee, Milton Caniff, Raoul Dufy, Lou Myers, Joseph Low, Antonio Frasconi and Paul Rand among others.
Bob Gill (Brooklyn, b. 1931) attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art before starting a freelance career in New York. His early work included illustrations for Esquire, Architectural Forum, Fortune, Seventeen, The Nation, children’s books and film titles. He won a New York Art Directors Gold Medal for a CBS television title in 1955.
In 1960 he moved to London to work for Charles Hobson, a London advertising agency and formed Fletcher / Forbes / Gill (a forerunner of Pentagram) with Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes. Gill resigned from the partnership in 1967 and resumed freelance life, which included teaching, writing children’s books and film-making.
In 1975 he returned to New York, where he designed a proposed 'peace monument' for Times Square, directed The Double Exposure of Holly, a hardcore porn film, and collaborated with Robert Rabinowitz to devise the multimedia musical Beatlemania, which ran for three years on Broadway.
Gill’s clients include Nestlé, D&AD, Apple Corps, the Rainbow Theatre, the Anti-apartheid Movement, Pirelli, CBS, Universal Pictures, Joseph Losey, Queen, Design, High Times and the United Nations.
He continues to advocate a no-nonsense approach to problem-solving, writing (in 1981) that 'Drawing (illustration) is just like design. It’s a process. A means not an end. Both are a way of making statements. So unless you have a specific point of view about something, don’t even begin the process.' He received the British D & AD President’s Award in May 1999.