http://www.illustration-magazine.com/GALLERY/browse.html

http://www.arlisna.org/pubs/reviews/index.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/30/boing-boing-gift-gui-5.html

Whoa! Look what Tiger Woods was reading when he crashed his car!

I’ve just finished Illustration #28, and the magazine is at the printer now. It should be out sometime in December, if all goes well! The cover feature is a spectacular and in-depth article on the work of McClelland Barclay, written by Patricia Gostick. (Pictured above is one of Barclay’s Holeproof Hosiery ads from the 1920s.) Barclay is another illustrator from my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri.

Also included in this issue is a feature on the work of illustrator Rudy Nappi, written by Gary Lovisi (publisher of Paperback Parade magazine.)

Check out the Illustration Magazine website for more information!

While his commentary is short, the review was accompanied by a large full-page sized reproduction of Brown’s Attack of the 50ft. Woman movie poster. You lose the effect online, but in print it was quite impressive. Heller writes:

…There is a funny similarity between the covers of “Alphonse Mucha” and Daniel Zimmer and David J. Hornung’s REYNOLD BROWN: A Life in Pictures (Illustrated Press, $39.95). Each illustration shows a female stereo type of its time, Mucha’s from 1898-99 and Brown’s from 1958. Born a few generations apart (Brown lived from 1917 to 1991), they exemplified the commercial art of their eras: both made posters for theatrical events; both painted actresses and idealized women. Mucha painted Bernhardt, a giant of the stage, and Brown painted Allison Hayes in “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,” a tall tale on film.

I always wondered who painted that “50 Foot Woman” poster, a perfect example of B-movie promotion. Brown signed his work (which not every film poster artist did), but I never really connected the signature with the artist who also captured the essence of so many other films, including “Tarantula!” about a “crawling terror 100 feet high”; “The Incredible Shrinking Man”; “Attack of the Puppet People”; “Al Capone,” starring Rod Steiger; “Flipper,” the story of a “fabulous dolphin”; and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” to name but a few of the dozens of famous and forgotten movies that Brown’s art promoted.

The days when realist/romantic illustrators like Brown ruled the advertising and pulp roosts are over. Illustrators have become more cerebral, emotive or decoratively stylized. Details of the kind Brown drew so precisely are no longer virtues but expendable irrelevancies. Still, this book — depicting a life through hundreds of amazing pictures, although the later, personal work is disappointingly cold and formulaic — reminds me of how much as a kid I wanted to create distant worlds (planets, battlefields, etc.) with paint and brush, just as Brown did. Without his facility, I could never do it.

Before he began designing movie posters, Reynold Brown illustrated covers for Popular Science, Outdoor Life and Auto in a pulp-realistic style. There was a time between the turn of the 20th century and the ’50s when most magazine covers were illustrated in this manner.…