I Am Not Worthy (5), Robert McGinnis

There lurked outside the pub yesterday a smooth man immaculately rendered. From the cigarette in his hand to the pointy toes of his shoes he was a man both suave, intelligent, and one who could tear a dozen ruffians in half like phone books. About him and staring down their noses as I went by, a pair of younger women in fabulous threads. Impossible starlets, spies, exotic and as out of place in Tolly Maw as blue jays in a graveyard. It was a fine, dappled sort of afternoon and I knew then it had all gone a bit Robert McGinnis.

Robert McGinnis with more than twelve hundred book covers and forty movie posters to his name is everything that is missing from advertising and book covers today. I grew up surrounded by books. Almost all tatty, mostly paperbacks, and probably a thousand of which had a McGinnis cover. He’s the definitive Bond artist, his work typifies the glorious beauty of a novel from the 60s and 70s – indeed in many ways his work is the 60s and 70s. Whilst as you’ll have seen in this series I like the quirky and the unique, with McGinnis all this gives way to the plain bloody-brilliant.

I can just sit and stare at McGinnis artwork for hours and know that I will never, not ever, be able to paint anything with even the first sniff of such an elegant talent. That is perfectly all right because I don’t need to, because Robert McGinnis has done it all for us already.