One of the best-known British film posters of the 20th century began life in the Borehamwood house of Stanley Kubrick, in a sketch drawn by the airbrush artist Philip Castle, who has died aged 83. Then a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art, who had advertised his services in the Daily Express, Castle was invited to meet the director at his home, where Kubrick played him a rough cut of his new film, A Clockwork Orange, without sound, and asked him to create a poster for it. “It was just incredible,” Castle told the Times in 2000. “My favourite film was Dr Strangelove, followed by 2001 [A Space Odyssey]. I was just the biggest fan.”
In the director’s home theatre, he drafted images in his notebook of Malcolm McDowell, who played the gang leader Alex DeLarge in Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel. McDowell stares menacingly out of the page, holding a knife, with a floating eyeball nearby. This notebook – shown at two recent exhibitions in London, Daydreaming With Stanley Kubrick at Somerset House (2016) and Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition at the Design Museum (2019) – holds most of the elements of the finished film poster, before Castle filled the final image with paint from an airbrush. This was the tool that allowed him to develop his distinctive style.
Typically used for painting cars and airplanes, and wired to an air compressor, the airbrush allowed for smooth paint application without brushstrokes, creating a futuristic sheen. After this innovation, other pop culture commissions followed for Castle. In 1974, he added shimmering effects and spray-painted the tear resting in David Bowie’s clavicle on the cover of his album Aladdin Sane. Castle designed posters for the Rolling Stones, for their It’s Only Rock and Roll But I Like It album campaign, and for Paul McCartney’s group Wings. In 1994, he crafted the hyperreal portrait of Pulp for the cover of their breakthrough album, His ‘n’ Hers, as well as images for their first Top 40 single, Do You Remember The First Time?, and their EP The Sisters.
Castle also continued to work with Kubrick, who gave him props to help with his work. The artist kept a helmet from his 1987 Vietnam war film Full Metal Jacket after designing the poster that featured it, as well as a bowler hat and one of the white plaster female nudes from A Clockwork Orange. “The Kubrick legacy greets me wherever I go, and so I’m eternally grateful,” Castle said in a 2011 interview with the documentary photographer Steve Mepsted. “It’s opened a lot of doors.”
Born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, to Margaret (nee Goldthorpe), a cleaner, and Wilson Castle, a joiner, Philip grew up in Ainley Top, a nearby village, with an elder brother, John. As a child he was keen on sketching planes, and cycled to local RAF bases to do so. He failed his 11-plus exam at South End primary school but was allowed to retake it at 13, after which he went to Elland grammar school.
Following a cycling accident at 17, which left him seriously concussed, Castle was allowed by his parents, who had previously discouraged his interest in art, to enrol at Huddersfield School of Art. This was followed by studies in illustration at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1964. There, he discovered an antique 1940s airbrush in the college basement, which he started using.
“I realised this was the technique the [car manufacturer] Pontiac artists had used,” Castle wrote in the foreword to Airshow (1989), the second book of his paintings after Airflow, published in 1980. “And [the Peruvian-American painter, Alberto] Vargas, who did the wartime pin-ups, which were copied on bomber fuselage. So I started doing the same thing, to get the beautiful finish I had been seeking.”
While studying, Castle worked for publications such as Woman’s Mirror, using the pseudonym Eli Beans. In 1967, his first exhibition as one of five emerging artists in a Royal College of Art showcase, and a Sunday Times commission for a feature called Dream Cars, brought his work to wider attention. He then produced adverts for the QE2 and Concorde, and worked for titles including Vogue, before his film work began.
Following his Kubrick commission for A Clockwork Orange, Castle created theatrical posters for Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend, the Jack Nicholson film Goin’ South, and Mike Hodges’ Flash Gordon, as well as album art for Mott the Hoople (Rock and Roll Queen) and Elkie Brooks (Shooting Star).
His portfolio also included Time magazine covers and book jackets, including one for the 1970 first paperback edition of Nik Cohn’s pioneering history of pop music, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, and the 1979 edition of Lennon Remembers, by Jann Wenner. Solo exhibitions of his work were held in 1978 and 1979 at Francis Kyle Gallery, in London, and another, at Sho Gallery in 2000, was devoted to his work on A Clockwork Orange.
Design work for car and aviation events reflected his interests from childhood, including posters for the 1997 Indianapolis 500 and several Royal International Air Tattoos. During his final decade, film directors continued to commission him. He worked on promotional material for Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 psychological drama, Phantom Thread, and Luca Guadagnino invited him to work on a poster for his 2024 film, Queer, starring Daniel Craig, citing Castle’s influence on his visual style, but Castle was not well enough to accept.
At the RCA in the 1960s, he met Jennifer Dew, a fellow student, whom he married in 1967. She survives him, as do their daughters, Nicolette, Alice and Amy, and five grandchildren.
• Philip Castle, artist and illustrator, born 20 October 1942; died 20 February 2026
