Every day during the summer, the franceinfo culture department shares its favorites with you. Today, it is the exhibition dedicated to John Howe, near Brest in Finistère.
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You certainly know the work of this Canadian illustrator. John Howe has indeed collaborated with Peter Jackson on the film trilogies The Lord of the Rings And The Hobbit.
With 350 drawings and paintings, this exhibition at the Leclerc Culture Fund in Landerneau (Finistère) is the largest ever devoted to John Howe. The Canadian designer living in Switzerland rediscovers his work here. “It’s an opportunity for me to see the drawings since I don’t usually see them, because we don’t put them on the wall at home.explains John Howe. It is also the privileged moment to share this with an audience. And I really believe in the idea of coming to see originals.”
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The film adaptation of Tolkien’s works gave him worldwide exposure. John Howe knows what he owes to the famous British writer. “He’s one of those wonderful authors who writes in pictures and he has an ability to conjure up pictures with few words.says the designer. And the great gift that these writers give us is that they don’t describe a lot of things in detail, but they describe the feelings of the characters when faced with a situation or a place. As a result, you have a little more elbow room. It leaves a certain kind of freedom.”
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Tolkien “allows a certain form of freedom”
We discover here all the richness of the work of the designer. “It’s a panorama, a retrospective on his workexplains Jean-Jacques Launier, one of the curators of the exhibition. We know a lot of things since it is a pictorial extension of Tolkien’s work in everything related to cinema, so many of these works are familiar to us. But we also discover all his imagination.
“He’s an artist with a great medieval culture. He has a huge library, but also a personal imagination which means that he brings real truthfulness and authenticity to the marvellous.”
Jean-Jacques Launier, one of the curators of the exhibitionat franceinfo
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Among the unpublished, inks and watercolors on the legend of King Arthur. The exhibition is structured by huge panels reproducing the cult images of John Howe. “This door is over four meters high and over six meters wide, and it is backlit by a light boxdescribes Jean-Jacques Launier. The original is also presented. It’s 90cm and it’s pretty awesome to be able to have an original and scale it up that much to see the detail and the quality of the light, regardless of the reproduction size.” John Howe confirms with this exhibition his extraordinary talent as an artist. His works, which he does not sell, would have their place in museums.
The exhibition In the footsteps of Tolkien and the medieval imagination is on view in Landerneau in Brittany at the Hélène and Edouard Leclerc Fund until January 28, 2024.