Some of us are waiting with bated breath for the Academy Awards (and some of us are waiting for them to be over so we can get back to more important things, like new episodes of The Daily Show), but it’s a time of year when movies become a topic of discussion.

Movie Poster Addict, a blog with the nice subtitle “Because we all like pretty pictures”, has posted 79 years of Best Picture Winners in Posters, featuring a series of the posters that accompanied the past Academy Award winners for Best Picture from 1927 up to last year.

These aren’t the best movie posters ever (by any means), simply the ones associated with the Best Picture winners, but some of them are pretty good, and it’s fascinating to see the mish-mash of quality between the posters and the movies; some of each are classic, and some of each are eminently forgettable.

If you click on most of the images in the blog post you’ll get an larger version. The links underneath lead to the source for the poster image which sometimes includes an even larger version and some information about the movie.

Unfortunately, many of them don’t include credits for the poster artist or designer, though some do. Some of them are the work of well known illustrators, like Bob Peak’s poster for My Fair Lady, John Van Hamersveld’s Amadeus poster and Richard Amsel doing his best to emulate J.C. Leyendecker in his poster for The Sting.

Credits for some of the older illustrations are apparently lost in the mists of time, or at least out of the reach of a quick Google.

For some more interesting posters, see Movie Poster Addict’s post on the 2007 Key Art Awards, which actually are awards for artwork associated with movie promotional materials.

[Link via Neatorama]

Brad Holland has been a major figure in contemporary American illustration for as long as I can remember, and I’ve wanted to do a post about him for some time, but I’ve been put off by his web site, in which the images are few and inexplicably small.

I just discovered, however, that Holland now has a space on illoz that is many times better than his own web site and finally gives an adequate view of his work.

Holland has a long list of prestigious clients including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair and many others.

I remember being impressed early on with his pen and ink drawings, in which he somehow made ink textures that felt like charcoal and pulled light out of darkness.

His ink drawings can be at times sophisticated and complex and at other times have a rough cartoony feeling reminiscent of the drawings of B. Kliban.

His color pieces have a remarkable feeling in which color and texture seem to be inseparable, as though he worked in color/texture as a sensibility rather then one or the other at any given moment.

His editorial illustrations can be brain-tinglingly clever in their concept and execution, often making a complete statement in themselves in addition to illustrating the written piece.

New York Art World hosts a page of quotes from Holland on art and related subjects that, agree or disagree, are worth a listen.

I particularly like his quote on “That’s Not Art, That’s Illustration”:

Almost everybody is an artist these days. Rock and Roll singers are artists. So are movie directors, performance artists, make-up artists, tattoo artists, con artists and rap artists. Movie stars are artists. Madonna is an artist, because she explores her own sexuality. Snoop Doggy Dogg is an artist because he explores other people’s sexuality. Victims who express their pain are artists. So are guys in prison who express themselves on shirt cardboard. Even consumers are artists when they express themselves in their selection of commodities. The only people left in America who seem not to be artists are illustrators.