Artist and illustrator Drew Struzan passed away on Monday. Unless you were an art geek hatched in the seventies and raised in the eighties like me, you may not know the name — but as a human on this planet, you’ve definitely seen his work.

Struzan created some of the most recognizable pieces of commercial art of my generation and the next. He’s best known for his movie posters, but his art also graced countless book and album covers.

I first noticed his work in 1982 when I was eight years old, walking into my local movie theater with my parents. I don’t remember what we were there to see, but I do remember what I saw hanging in that neon-lit lobby: a poster for John Carpenter’s The Thing.

I knew nothing about the original or even about Carpenter yet, but I knew I had to see that movie. The poster looked unlike anything else in that lobby — or anything I’d ever seen. It was simple: a lone figure in snow gear, light pouring from his head, snow swirling around him. The damn thing almost felt cold.

There was no internet back then, no easy way to look up who painted it. But I noticed a small signature in the lower left corner: “Drew.” I filed that name away in my brain.

Over the next decade, I’d spot more of his posters — Back to the Future, Return of the Jedi, E.T. — and later his artwork on tattered VHS covers. His style was unmistakable: perfect likenesses layered in thin washes of acrylic, detailed with colored pencil for texture and depth.

As a young aspiring artist, I was both fascinated and frustrated. My best pieces weren’t at the level of his worst. But what I learned from him was priceless — that you could make a living creating images that told stories all on their own.

Drew Struzan planted that seed in me: that art could be a life. I never hit the same highs he did, but I’ve made a pretty good living for over three decades now, selling words and pictures — and that spark started with him.

Today I read that Drew passed away, likely from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. Like most of us do in these modern times, I went down the online rabbit hole — reading everything I could find about his life and career. Every detail affirmed he came from the most humble beginnings and rose to be the best at what he did.

Then I came across one quote that stopped me in my tracks:

Think about that for a minute. He turned his biggest obstacle into the very thing that made him great. The constraint that could have held him back became his signature. His talent, bounded by the limits he was dealt, gave him an edge over every one of his peers.

That’s a lesson worth holding onto — for artists, for makers, for anyone trying to create something meaningful in the face of limitation.

Poverty produced a technique.