flashback...

i can guarantee that you've seen some of his work -

Drew Struzan (born March 1947) is an American artist. Struzan has painted album covers, advertising, collectibles, and book covers, but he is best known for his extensive movie poster work.

Struzan is one of the industry's most recognized talents, having provided artwork for over 150 movie posters, including many of the best-known films of all time. A particular favorite artist of film directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg...

A Portland, Oregon native, Struzan was born a child prodigy with the rare distinction of skill in art. In 1965, at age 18, he enrolled at the Art Center College of Design. "The first thing the counselor asked me was 'what do you want to major in,' so I asked what the choices were." He was informed that he had two choices: fine art or illustration. The counselor went on to describe the two careers, telling Struzan that as a fine artist he could paint what he wanted, but as an illustrator he could paint for money. It didn't take him too long to choose his course of study. "I'll be an illustrator," he announced. "I need to eat."

After graduating from college, Struzan found a job as a staff artist for a design studio. There he began designing album covers. Over the next 5 years, he would create album cover artwork for a long line of musical artists, including Tony Orlando and Dawn, The Beach Boys, Bee Gees, Roy Orbison, Black Sabbath, Glenn Miller, Iron Butterfly, Bach, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Liberace.

Along with a friend, Struzan started a small company, Pencil Pushers. It was during this time that he honed his distinctive one-sheet style and first became proficient in the use of the airbrush, which would later define him as a master of the tool. In 1977, fellow artist Charles White III, had been hired by Lucas to create a poster design for the 1978 re-release of Star Wars. White, uncomfortable with portraiture, asked Struzan for his help on the project. As such, Struzan painted the human characters in oil paints and White focused on the ships, Darth Vader, C-3PO and all the mechanical details of the poster art. The poster went on to become a fan favorite as well as the director's, as the original art hangs in Lucas' Northern California home.

Throughout the '70s and '80s Struzan produced a constant stream of work for such diverse films as Blade Runner, The Cannonball Run, the Police Academy series, Coming To America, First Blood, Risky Business, An American Tail and The Goonies, among many, many others. But his most recognizable works would be The Back to the Future series, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Indiana Jones series, The Star Wars series.

Although equally talented in other media, Struzan's primary work medium is airbrushed acrylics on board with finishing details in colored pencil. Working from reference photographs and live models, Struzan has been known, at times, to include depictions of himself, family members and friends in his work. He is known for working very quickly; typically it takes him two days to finish a painting.

"A poster becomes that one image that represents the entire film," Struzan says. "If it is accurate and truthful and has good spirit, it resides with you forever."

Here are some favorites from my childhood :-)

Drew's website

a new thing: Stuart Davis

So i'm trying this new thing: at least once a week, I want to blog about an artist or art movement. I've been getting art book from the library and reading all kinds of different websites and blogs, so i've decided to share with you. Let's start with Stuart Davis, a personal fav...

Stuart Davis (December 7, 1892 - June 24, 1964), was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his Jazz influenced, proto-pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s.

He grew up in an artistic environment, for his father was art director of a Philadelphia newspaper and his mother was a sculptor. Between 1910-13, Stuart made covers and drawings for the social realist periodical The Masses. It was during an exhibition in 1913, which also included works by Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, that Stuart became a committed "modern" artist. After a visit to Paris in 1928-29 he introduced a new note into US Cubism. Using natural forms, particularly forms suggesting the characteristic environment of American life, he rearranged them into flat poster-like patterns with precise outlines and sharply contrasting colors.

He later went over to pure abstract patterns, into which he often introduced lettering, suggestions of advertisements, posters, etc. The zest and dynamism of such works reflect his interest in jazz. Davis is generally considered to be the outstanding American artist to work in a Cubist idiom. He made witty and original use of it and created a distinctive American style, for however abstract his works became he always claimed that every image he used had its source in observed reality: `I paint what I see in America, in other words I paint the American Scene.'

what happened?

Yeah, that's right. I'm a jerk. I said that i wanted to blog more, then i go for weeks without posting. Well, i'm not making excuses but i want you to know what happened. Ok, for about a week, i was just lazy. I didn't post because i didn't want to. Then i woke up one morning and thought, I'm gonna blog today. Wouldn't you know, that would be the day we lost the internet at our house. We were switching over to a new provider or something and we had to wait for our new router (or something) to come in the mail. So that was a few days. Then as soon as we got our internet up and running, I took a trip to Kansas City with my friend, Rita, to visit my sister, Courtney (a.k.a. Nourtney). And I just got back yesterday. So here's a short little blog post, let's call it a "bloglet"...

my told my sister-in-law, Sarah, that I would paint her anything for her birthday - her choice :-) she wanted something to go in their kitchen and she found a vintage advert for orange juice. here's the finished product...

imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? the original poster