Pop art: the music-filled career of visual artist Michael Gillette

With a career that spans three decades and a client list that includes the likes of the Beastie Boys, Paul McCartney, MGMT and Beck, British artist Michael Gillette has spent his career channeling music into seductive visual art.

From early aspirations of pop stardom, to getting his break in 1992 when he created a logo for Saint Etienne’s Top Of The Pops performance, San Francisco-based Gillette has some stories to tell. Now, for the first time, an edited selection of his work has been spread across 192 pages of a new weighty monograph that chronicles this inspired career.

Called Drawn In Stereo and published by Ammo, the book showcases never-before-seen pages from Gillette’s sketchbooks, music video animation stills and his magazine contributions for titles such as Spin, MOJO, Q and the New Yorker. 

In addition, Lemon Jelly’s Fred Deakin has supplied a foreword while Elastica’s Justine Frischmann has contributed an interview with the artist. As Frischmann herself puts it, ’Michael Gillette’s work is a celebration of the fragmentary, jumbled nature of pop culture from the last half century synthesised into something that is always cheekily seductive and often heart-wrenchingly beautiful.’