Artist of the day: Artist of the day, November 10: Brad Holland, American illustrator

Friday, November 10, 2017

Artist of the day, November 10: Brad Holland, American illustrator

Brad Holland (1943) is a self-taught artist whose work has appeared in Time, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and many other national and international publications. Paintings by the artist have been exhibited in museums around the world, including one-man exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Clermont-Ferrand, France; The Museum of American Illustration, New York City.

Born in Fremont, Ohio, Holland began sending drawings to Walt Disney, as well as the Saturday Evening Post at the age of 15. At 17, after receiving a box of his drawings back from Disney with a Mickey Mouse masthead rejection letter as well as numerous rejection letters from the Saturday Evening Post, Holland traveled by bus to Chicago where he found odd jobs, including sweeping the floor of a tattoo parlor. At age 20 the artist was hired by Hallmark in Kansas City to illustrate books as a staff artist. Among the books he would illustrate for Hallmark was A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. In 1967 at age 23, Holland moved to New York City to pursue a career as a full-time freelance illustrator.

While the use of visual metaphor is now taken for granted in the world of illustration, when Holland entered the field this was not the case. It was the accepted standard of the time (1968) that art directors dictated or inferred what they wanted an illustrator to create as a finished assignment. When Holland entered the illustration field, his philosophy was entirely different than what his predecessors had accepted as common practice. He vowed to never render anyone else's idea but rather always find a better, more personal solution to any illustration assignment he might accept. There are several illustrators whose work brought about a fundamental and lasting change in this dictatorial method of art direction and Holland can be counted among the first. The New York Times art director Jean-Claude Suares can also take a great deal of credit in this fundamental curatorial change to the way that illustration was viewed from a top-down 'do as you are told' profession to a more artist-driven form of artistic communication. In the New York Times obituary for Suares, Holland is quoted as saying he (Suares) "gave us an opportunity to redefine what graphic art could be and do".

When Holland first worked with Harrison Salisbury at the New York Times he said "imagine you’ve locked the writer in one room and me in another and given us both the same assignment. The writer will give you an article, I’ll give you a picture; you marry the two." Because of Hollands' artistic philosophy of the time, the long-standing assumption that commercial illustration should simply reinforce the text was to quickly come to an end and his artistic legacy would be largely founded on those historical milestones.

By the mid 1970s Hollands use of visual metaphor, known by this point as "conceptual illustration", was so firmly established and pervasive that Op-Ed art director Steven Heller said that only 25 percent of Op-Ed artists knew the content of the articles their work was to accompany

Artist of the day

Friday, November 10, 2017

Artist of the day, November 10: Brad Holland, American illustrator

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