Remembering Drew Struzan

When I was a boy growing up in rural Missouri, art felt like something distant. It felt like a luxury that lived in museums or faraway cities. The closest I came to the grandness of a gallery was a movie theater, the record section at Walmart, or our small library that carried Star Wars paperbacks with covers that seemed to glow. I didn’t yet know the name Drew Struzan, but I knew his hand. His art was the light by which I came to know the world.

For me, Struzan was as essential as John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith. Struzan was the painter to their composers, the visual echo to the music that carried me. Where soundtracks shaped the inner score of my imagination, Struzan gave it a face, a color, a texture. His paintings didn’t just illustrate; they invited. They were cinematic overtures, preludes to feeling.

Before I ever saw a film, I saw his work: Indiana Jones with his hat brim dipped in shadow; Marty McFly checking his watch as if time itself were bending around him; Luke Skywalker bathed in light while Vader loomed in silhouette. Each poster was an altar, each composition a hymn, in my church of cinema. 

But his reach didn’t stop at the theater door. I found him in the aisles of the local library and bookstore, on the glossy covers of the Expanded Universe novels I ate up like candy, books like Shadows of the Empire, I, Jedi, and The Crystal Star. These were not just books; they were portals. I remember the smell of the pages, the way the art pulled me in before the words could. His brush taught me to expect emotion before language, to let image lead imagination.

Then, years later, I realized he had been with me even longer. The album covers I loved — Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare, Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath — bore his unmistakable signature. The record jacket became as sacred as the music itself. Even there, in the hum of rural isolation, art found me. And that’s the magic of Drew Struzan: he made art democratic. He bridged the gap between the fine and the popular, between Hollywood and the heartland.

In that way, Struzan’s art became a kind of education — a visual literacy that required no teacher. He gave my young mind access to beauty without permission, without pretense. He taught me to read emotion through color, to recognize tone in composition, to feel story in stillness. Long before I could discuss art history or aesthetics, I understood those things intuitively through him.

Philosophically, his work sits at the intersection of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: disciplined in form, yet wild in feeling. His compositions are mythic but human, precise yet alive. Psychologically, they operate like mirrors of the self: reflections of our yearning for heroism, belonging, redemption. He gave faces to our inner archetypes: the hero, the seeker, the friend, the fool.

And all of this, all this beauty and myth, reached even a boy in southwest Missouri. That is what I mean by democracy of art. He brought the museum to the movie theater, the gallery to the paperback, the sacred to the everyday. He made art accessible not by simplifying it, but by trusting that all of us, even a kid in the Ozarks, could feel the sublime.

Renato Casaro did this too, in his Italian way; another painter of myth who understood that the promise of a story is as beautiful as the story itself. Together they showed that marketing, when done by true artists, can be something transcendent. They didn’t sell tickets or records or books; they sold wonder.

When I think of Struzan now, I think of the light in his paintings. I think of that warm, amber glow that feels like nostalgia itself. His art wasn’t just about faces and figures; it was about light, memory, and the dream of story. It shaped how I see the world, how I teach, how I draw. It taught me that art can find us anywhere and that sometimes the gallery is a cardboard display in a small-town theater lobby.

Drew Struzan was the artist who painted the soul of cinema, but for me, he was also the artist who made art feel possible. He showed me that beauty wasn’t reserved for the city or the elite. He showed me that it could hang on the wall of a rural Missouri bedroom, printed on a poster, a paperback, or a record sleeve, and still change your life.

Drew Struzan’s Iconic Works Across Media

Film Posters

• Star Wars (1978 re-release)

• The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

• Return of the Jedi (1983; 1997 Special Edition)

• Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

• Back to the Future trilogy (1985–1990)

• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

• Blade Runner (1982)

• The Thing (1982)

• The Goonies (1985)

• Hook (1991)

• The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

• Hellboy (2004)

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)

• Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Book Covers (Expanded Universe & Literature)

• Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (1996)

• I, Jedi (1998)

• The Crystal Star (1994)

• The Courtship of Princess Leia (1994)

• The Truce at Bakura (1993)

Album Covers

• Alice Cooper – Welcome to My Nightmare (1975)

• Black Sabbath – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)

• Alice Cooper – Greatest Hits (1974)

Other Works

• Designer of the Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) logo

• Illustrated over 30 U.S. postage stamps, including John Wayne and James Stewart

• Cover artist for Action Comics #800

• Artwork for Clue board game reissue

• Subject of the documentary Drew: The Man Behind the Poster (2013)