Portrait artist Gil Gibli was born in Tel Aviv in 1957. He grew up on a kibbutz in northern Israel.
After a stint in the Israeli Navy, he began to paint in 1978.
In 1982, Gibli moved to New York and studied painting and drawing at the New York Studio for one year, subsequently continuing his studies in etching and lithography at the Pratt University Graphic Center.
Upon graduating from Manhattan's Empire State College in 1987, he joined the prestigious Cartoonists Association. Gibli's first job was as an assistant to syndicated cartoonist Raanan Lurie, while at the same time he developed his own unique style of illustration.
Gibli's work has appeared in various publications in Israel and elsewhere, but he is probably most closely identified with the Israeli business daily newspaper Globes.
As Globes' house artist, Gibli has developed a technique of monochrome realist portraiture, employing the fine cross-hatching that has become his - and the newspaper's - trademark.
Gibli is the winner of a United Nations cartoon contest. His most recent exhibition, in 2011, was of caricatures of leading political and business figures, in Israel and the world.
Gibli is also a noted police forensic sketch artist - The Israel Police Force uses Gibli's services in creating composite sketches, some of which have helped to bring criminals to justice and to find missing people. Gibli has developed a system for interrogating eye-witnesses and creating a composite image based on their descriptions. He has refined his method into a patent-pending form. This work has been cited in international professional literature. Gibli often finds himself burrowing into the past as an investigator into crimes whose trails have gone cold.
On his website, Gibli describes several cases in which his forensic art brought the truth to light: reconstructing a portrait of Warsaw Ghetto uprising leader Pavel Frankel based solely on eye-witness accounts; bringing together two Yom Kippur War comrades after 35 years; and, in the most chilling case, identifying a man, a nameless drifter, killed in a terror attack. That story - and Gibli’s uncanny ability to elicit details from eye-witnesses - was documented in the award-winning documentary No. 17 is Anonymous.
Gibli is also a jazz aficionado, and his portraits include a series of jazz greats - more looking back, but in a cooler, gentler mood.
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