Devout Catholic and sexual deviant, East Sussex born Eric Gill (1882 - 1940) was also dubbed a Royal Designer for Industry.
Gill found himself in each of those categories through no half-hearted circumstances. At 18 years of age, he moved to London to study architecture. A shift in interests, with good result, led him to Stone Masonry and Calligraphy classes in the evening. Gill developed his type design to an unforgettable esteem. The Gill Sans typeface is a near perfect Humanist style that is most likely in all default font lists on nearly every computer in the world. Gill never strayed from his Catholic roots no matter how unorthodox his religious practices. He strived to connect his appreciation for both art and religion through various essays discussing their relationships. In 1989, elements of Gill's personal diaries were published in a biography and shocked the world with confessions of many sexual exploits and sexual abuses. Some of the perverse corners of his private life appear in many of his engravings. The controversy of his art always rivaled the exquisite nature of it, but neither content or talent ever won out over the other. Gill had always been accepted as strange in the art and design world, and his output was immense. He could sculpt, work with letter form, write, and print his own engravings. He succeeded at being both a man artistically rounded, and deeply flawed. We should all be so lucky.
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