Gil Cohen (born July 28, 1931 in Philadelphia) is an American artist, noted for his illustrations of aircraft and people in military service, who also illustrated men's magazines, books and movie posters. Biography Gilbert B. Cohen was born to Philip and Hannah (née Borofsky) Cohen on July 28, 1931 and raised in Philadelphia where his Russian-immigrant grandparents and father operated a hardware store. He trained as an illustrator at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, where he studied under artists Karl Sherman, Henry C. Pitz, Albert Gold, Joe Krush and S. Gertrude Schell, and then graduated in 1953. Soon thereafter, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to a military intelligence unit in Germany where he rendered images of Soviet weaponry, based on verbal espionage reports. Upon his release from the Army, he resumed his chosen career in commercial art and illustration. As of 2017, Cohen maintained a studio at his home in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Career Cohen's artistic career spanned more than six decades of producing images for men's magazines, movie posters, books, government agencies, and later producing carefully researched fine-art oil paintings of aviation and war-related subjects. He also assumed both teaching and administrative duties in his field of illustration. He is an Artist Fellow of the American Society of Aviation Artists. Aviation art Cohen’s interest in aviation began as a youth during the Second World War, when he became proficient in identifying a wide variety of aircraft of the time. This interest was renewed, when he became interested in producing World War II aviation art, which included a series of paintings depicting the activities of the Eighth Air Force—examples of which were exhibited in a one-man show at the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force in Pooler, Georgia for six months, starting December 1988. In 1997, he began publishing limited-edition prints of his aviation art, which were distributed through art-print vendors in the U.S. and Great Britain. A retrospective of Cohen's aviation art was published in 2009. A reviewer of Cohen's body of work noted that it both presented faithful depictions of aircraft and, more significantly, focused on the people involved and the emotional energy that they brought to their activities. He traveled under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force to theaters of conflict in Bosnia, Somalia, and Central Asia and also to Israel to create paintings that he donated to the U.S.