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Illustrator John Howe is a Canadian born artist whose works have become legendary over his prolonged career in the art industry. With many recognizing his contributions to the Lord of the Rings and now The Hobbit film series, his ability to extract worlds that have become literary milestones is for the most part unparalleled. He has illustrated extensively for fantasy driven literature, has written children’s books, design work for collectible cards and much more. Howe is an artist who really finds very specific mediums to express something out of this world and his technique is always reflective of a person who has really studied and applied their craft.

Now residing in Europe and fulfilling the continuation of a life rooted in the arts, John Howe is an inspiring individual to all of us at Sound Colour Vibration and a creative member of this society that we knew would be a very important contribution to our interview archives. His art work has really defined something special for the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film world and without his contributions among many others, those films would never be possible. John Howe is simply one of the best.

http://www.john-howe.com/

Q&A with John Howe
Conducted by Xavier Vilaplana

Xavier: Before working on the illustrations for any of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works and worlds, what was your relationship with his works?

John: Quite flawed, entirely by my own doing, I’m afraid! I read the Lord of the Rings in the wrong order, much to my embarrassment. The Fellowship of the Ring was never available at the local library, I waited and waited, but of course it was one of those books that everyone borrowed, kept for a month and likely bogged down somewhere during the first hundred and fifty pages. The other two volumes never left the shelves, so I took out The Two Towers and read that first, followed by The Return of the King, and eventually by the Fellowship. Needless to say, that was a very stupid thing to do, so my first reading of the Lord of the Rings was not something I’m very proud of. I was 12 or so at the time and couldn’t afford to actually buy the books, which is hardly an excuse, I suppose. I eventually re-read the book in the right order many years later. (The Hobbit I believe I read around the age of 7 or so, but I can only recall the Unexpected Party, so it’s quite possible I never finished it.)

I only really began to appreciate the books when I finally learned enough about Tolkien’s own sources and motivations to appreciate their depth and meaning. Though I was attracted to the most dramatic episodes, I had largely missed all of the more subtle references entirely. I have found, though, over the years, that anything which immediately attracts my interest in any domain (usually visual, of course) will be of interest on many other levels once you take the time to scratch the surface and look a little deeper.

In high school, I did paintings (in oil pastel, of all things!) based on Tolkien’s work (thankfully, none of those have survived) and eventually received commissions from the publishers of the novels, then Unwin Books, for calendar imagery.

There are all manner of curious associations which have developed over those decades, some by choice, some by chance, which has allowed me not only to pay the bills by doing work associated with Tolkien, but to acquire a view of the landscape and nature which is certainly largely influenced by a wide palette of myth and legend to which Tolkien’s writing introduced me. I will always be grateful for the doors that his writing opened.

Xavier: Was your relationship to Tolkien’s work something that led you to contribute on The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe being that C. S. Lewis and Tolkien were friends?

John: In a sense, I suppose that could be true. I was asked to work on the Narnia film following the work done on the Lord of the Rings. I only worked on the first movie, though, for about 6 months.

Xavier: How is it working with both Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson on The Hobbit films? What was the difference between both of their perspectives? How did it translate into your drawings?

That’s a very hard question to answer. I don’t know anything about filmmaking, really, and my contribution to such huge productions is a very limited one – it’s rather like asking a very small cog how a steam engine works.

They are obviously both immensely talented filmmakers. Both have an appreciation for and a high degree for what I’d call “image literacy” where concept art is concerned. They also never forget a picture, which is gratifying for the teams that produce the huge quantity of artwork this kind of project requires.

Guillermo is an all-embracing personality, he reads widely and voraciously, has incredibly eclectic tastes in art, and in a sense reaches out and gathers the world in to himself, where he fashions and shapes it into his personal vision, a sort of empire by acquisition and conquest, colourful, varied, extensive, always filled with significant detail and depth. Working with Guillermo means keeping up with his light-speed far-ranging imagination, understanding his esoteric and subtle references, and trying to weld all of that into a rich and coherent world.

Peter tends to work from the center outwards, in a sense, finding inspiration in the narrative and the world he imagines, contributing, at least initially, a deep sense of curiosity and a desire to explore, pushing the imaginations of his concept team out into places they might not spontaneously go. In a way, it’s an empire built on patient exploration, colourful, varied, extensive, always filled with significant detail and depth. Working with Peter means responding to those hints and trying to help him build outwards to create a rich and coherent world.

I’m sure both of them would shake their heads in mild puzzlement at that appraisal, and likely it doesn’t capture their methodology or approach at all.

Xavier: What are the differences between the Lord of The Rings illustrations and The Hobbit and which do you feel more inclined to dive into?

John: Clearly the Lord of the Rings appealed to me more, but certainly because I had never considered the depth of the Hobbit – the world behind what looks (and initially reads) like a children’s story is rather harder to perceive. This said, it is entirely my fault as an inattentive reader, mistaking style for content and doing very little reading between the lines, lulled to a sense of complacency by what appears to be a bedtime story. (This is something that happens distressingly often concerning meaning in myth and legend, echoing the period where Grimm had devolved into edulcorated nursery material before Bettleheim’s pioneering research – the rose without the thorns, in sum, but that’s another debate.)

The Hobbit is a fascinating glimpse into a world that changes and deepens from chapter to chapter, where the roots of the Lord of the Rings can already be seen deep in the ground. The implied tale of the Beornings, for example, has echoes of Scandinavian legend, and a deep sense of loss of nature, not the park-like inviting nature of the Shire, but a more savage and challenging view of the world, primal and fierce. Smaug is every western dragon, but shorn of the devilish attributes with which Christianity has saddled dragons, he is the true descendant of Fafnir and his brood, reminders of the inevitable doom brought by all-consuming greed. There is so much in the Hobbit that is either cleverly disguised, or possibly more plausibly barely glimpsed by the author, themes that he would return to in greater depth in the Lord of the Rings.

This said, that approach to illustrating the Hobbit would be to deny the intended public, a much younger audience than Tolkien intended with The Lord of the Rings, a certain warmth and gentleness of vision in favour of a vision exterior to the novel itself. So, in that sense, I would distinguish between illustrating the book and exploring the themes Tolkien touches upon in the same book. The two could yield very different imagery.

Xavier: What’s it like imagining someone else’s world and bringing it to life as drawings?

John: I think it’s what I prefer. Have you ever felt how strongly felt an idea that is not one’s own can be? Somehow, the theme chanced upon, whether it’s a novel or a book of myth, can contain perspectives that you would never imagine yourself. It is somehow like the perfect landscape, the sublime view, precisely because it does not belong to you, it is possible to approach it with your own experience and vision, and create that third entity, which is the encounter of two imaginations. It combines the excitement of extraordinary visions with the inconvenience of those details with which one might be less enamoured, conveying a sense of reality to fantasy and making any pictorial exploration of that world incredibly exciting.

Illustration is a proposition, a spontaneous exploration not only of the theme to hand, but also the deeper currents that make imagery necessary. If there’s room, I’d love to share a text I wrote for a book or a catalogue, but which was never used. It sums up my thoughts on fantasy illustration in general:

Images were magic once. They adorned the walls of deep caverns, propitiated, evoking victory over creatures dangerous and necessary for survival. In that way, man possessed the essence of those creatures as well as their nourishing flesh.

Images were language once. The earliest letters, long after the earliest hieroglyphs (the meaning of “hieroglyph” is “sacred carving”), evoked creatures and elements. They summed up, or conjured, or invoked those things they named, and gradually gathered meanings as they grew more abstract and distanced from imagery.

Images were true once. Stories of ogres, dragons, princesses and knights grew in the minds of those harkening to the storytellers the Brothers Grimm patiently listened to as well. The same kinds of stories were sung and told through countless generations, before their penning by scribes. Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Jason, Arthur, and countless more, before we invented fiction as we know it, possessed images that were real in the minds of those who knew the stories.

Now images are no longer magic, no longer language, no longer necessarily true. They are used, abused, manipulated, commercialized and bought and sold like other commodities. We take them for granted. We associate them with immaturity – we believe “serious” imagery deals with life, not with things imagined.

Nevertheless, fantasy art is the inheritor of that magic, language and truth that once only it communicated. Fantasy is the realm of archetype, meaningless only if art itself were to disappear from the face of the earth. If I could claim as my own words written more than a century ago, it would be these:
“En effet, lorsque l’époque où un homme de talent est obligé de vivre, est plate et bête, l’artiste est, à son insu même, hanté par la nostalgie d’un autre siècle.
.. Chez les uns, c’est un retour aux âges consommés, aux civilisations disparues, aux temps morts; chez les autres, c’est un élancement vers la fantastique et vers le rêve…” ~ J. K. Huysmans (1848-1907), “À Rebours”, 1884.

(“The truth is, when the period at which a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid, the artist is, unconsciously to himself, haunted by a sensation of morbid yearning for another century… In some cases, it is a return to past ages, to vanished civilizations, to dead centuries; in others, it is an impulse towards the fantastic, the land of dreams, it is a vision more or less vivid of a time to come whose images reproduce, without his being aware, as a result of atavism, that of by-gone epochs.” ~ J. K. Huysmans, “Against the Grain”, published in English in 1926.)


The resonance of fantasy is as pertinent as ever, but fantasy is a master of disguises, and always reappears where we least expect it. The magic and the truth remain; it is up to us to learn the language again.

Xavier: Drawing, is it something that manifests currently as a necessity more than a joy or profession?

John: I’ll have all three, please, if I may! I believe the urge to draw, which is shared by all children, but eventually fades for most, is a necessity, a way of comprehending the world and one’s view of it. Because it involves satisfaction – both accomplishing something you set out to do, “getting it right” in one’s own eyes, and the approval it gets in the family circle – it can easily become a way of defining oneself. It can become a profession when those two qualities are maintained, if a person’s drawing skills can keep pace with one’s expectations and if the opportunities for art education and eventually work present themselves.

So, yes indeed, drawing is a necessity. It colours my view of the world, it helps me understand things, it is a way of connecting with what’s around me, as well as communicating how I feel about those things. It remains a joy because there is the simple satisfaction of getting the occasional drawing or painting “right” (whatever that means), or at least imagining that the next painting will accomplish that. (I invariably reply “The next one” to the “What’s your favourite painting?” question.)

Lastly of course, yes, it is now my profession, with all the responsibility that entails to my clients and to the subject matter I encounter.

Xavier: Do you ever see yourself writing and illustrating?

John: Yes please! My ambition would be to write and have others illustrate the texts. (That way I could hassle illustrators pitilessly.) Seriously, I’ve always wanted to write and admire those for whom it seems so effortless. I’m sure this comes from the desire to tell stories, but being awkward with words, not having the ability to use them effectively. In that sense, drawing is the language of the writer who cannot write – looking back as far as I can recall drawings I’ve done, back to elementary school, they were always about telling stories. I found little satisfaction in the standard assignments (sometimes I think it’s a wonder I survived school, often I couldn’t even get into art class, since it was already full of students who had been kicked out of other classes and parked in art, though I did have the good fortune of having a wonderfully encouraging teacher in my final year of high school) and little interest in landscapes or still lifes; all my pictures, without exception, were narrative.

I also love the interplay between explicit narrative, implicit narrative and internal pictorial logic in any picture that tells a story.

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John Howe presents “From Bag End to Wilderland”
Illustrations for The Hobbit, or There and Back Again