James Gulliver Hancock

To say that James Gulliver Hancock loves drawing is an understatement. 

The Sydney-based artist and illustrator loves drawing the way Simone Biles loves gymnastics, or the way Sir Edmund Hilary loves mountains. He loves it the way Magnus Norman loves chess. 

That is to say, he loves it in a way that has shaped the entire trajectory of his life. 

“I’m one of the lucky people that’s been obsessed with something from the very beginning and has made it into a career,” says Hancock, a graduate of the UTS Bachelor of Visual Communication. 

Pathway to an art career

At the time, it wasn’t always clear what that career might look like. At high school, he loved fine art, and he loved technical drawing, but he didn’t really feel completely at home in either discipline. It was when he landed a Year 10 work experience placement with fashion and lifestyle brand Mambo that things started to fall into place. 

Back then — this was the 90s — Mambo was breaking new ground with their brightly coloured, screen-printed clothing and accessories. The experience showed Hancock that there was a pathway into an art career that might be a better fit for him. 

“That Mambo idea of putting graphics on different products and making money with it was quite nice,” he says. 

“I think that really solidified the commercial art idea for me.” 

By the time university rolled around, Hancock was set on pursuing a graphic design qualification. The UTS Visual Communication degree immediately caught his eye with its combination of traditional graphic design and more experimental creative work — making models, taking photographs, designing objects, and drawing, drawing, drawing.  

“It helped me build those different skills. You know, there was the architectural and the technical and then it was creative and had fashion and other stuff in there too,” he says.  

Say yes to everything

Straight out of uni, he and some mates had moved into an old bank in Surry Hills that had a creative space downstairs, and it was here that Hancock’s fledgling career began. He started out small, designing posters for a mate’s band and printing graphics onto t-shirts and CDs. 

The work started trickling in — a website here, an animation there. Small jobs became bigger jobs. Bigger jobs became financially significant commissions. Before long, he was a full-time freelance illustrator whose business was based on a singular ethos: say yes to everything. 

Because I’d done that UTS degree, I knew how to animate, I knew how to make a website, I knew how to do basic graphic design, but I also knew how to conceptualise and draw and do these things that someone from a more technically based course might not be able to do.

Those skills laid the foundations for what has become a remarkable global career. Over the last 20-plus years, Hancock has drawn everything from books to portraits, murals to maps, packaging to prints to typography. 

Among his well-known work is the ‘All the Buildings’ series in which he drew the cityscapes of New York, followed by those of Paris, London, Sydney and Melbourne.

He’s also done commissions for Lonely Planet and Ray-Ban, Aldi, Shell, Chipotle, Dinex Restaurant Group and Herman Miller, to name a few, and he’s combined his commercial work with fine art exhibitions that have taken him all over the world, from Sydney to Berlin, Paris, New York, LA and back again. 

His success is largely based on that long-held capacity to straddle the creative and the technical with ease, but it’s also the result of his love of art, his endlessly curious mind and his seeming inability to say no. 

And why would he? For someone who loves drawing, James Gulliver Hancock is living the dream. 

“Most people that approach me, I tend to take on their work and I get into it,” he says.

“Because I just love seeing where the path goes.”