Yeah, illustrations that show actual scenes are almost allways better. When I saw the art gallery for the Spell Compendium I was quite blown away by most of it.
My actual favorite D&D artist, Jason Engle, sadly usally has no more than one or two works in a given book (he has quite an amount in the SC though). I didn't know about him till recently, when I found his website and found out that some of my favorites where his work. He usually shows some kind of scene and his pictures tend to be quite stylish and just "right", at least to me.