Between 1958 and 1962, Dutch artist Cor Blok created 140 illustrations for J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. These were among the earliest attempts at visualizing the story.
Cor Blok visited The Professor in Oxford in 1961, and Tolkien purchased two of Blok’s pieces, adding a third as a present. His artwork has been featured on a Dutch edition of The Lord of the Rings, in Tolkien calendars, and in many exhibitions, including the Tolkien Centenary Exhibition in The Hague in 1992. In 2011, a collection of Cor Blok’s art was published by HarperCollins. The book, titled A Tolkien Tapestry was edited by Pieter Collier.
An experiment in communication by artist Cor Blok to be released in Spring 2015.
Feb. 3, 2015 — Pieter Collier of the Tolkien Library provided an exceptional description of The Iron Parachute excerpted from information that Cor Blok once gave him.
“There is no ‘plot’ in the usual sense: the book is constructed rather like a building with many different rooms that may be visited starting anywhere.”
Although the first pieces date back to 1967, Blok began working on the images in earnest in 1973, constantly refining the flow until he was satisfied. Now he has brought the book to completion and Oloris Publishing has the privilege of publishing Blok’s incredible work of a lifetime.
Blok eloquently explains his work as it progressed:
“Most graphic novel writers will start with a story they want to tell and then choose a pictorial language that best suits the narrative. But when I started working on The Iron Parachute back in 1967, I had no idea of a story I would want to tell. Instead, I was prompted by a long-standing interest in the various ways in which human beings have been trying to communicate through pictures, from ancient Egypt and Mexico, the Book of Kells, and Persian and Indian miniatures to Krazy Kat and Batman comics and the pictographs that direct you to the emergency exit. For years I had been painting, but producing pictures that were mere incidents, so to speak, unconnected to everything else, no longer satisfied me. After all, I could fall back on a couple of years experience combining image and narrative working on my pictures inspired by The Lord of the Rings.
“When I decided, a few years ago, that The Iron Parachute was finished, it turned out that it contained not one but several stories, only loosely interconnected. Some of these are told in more or less traditional comic strip style, some in the format of an illustrated scientific magazine, or of a scene from a play; some are told in pictures only, without any text. Technique includes black and white pen drawing as well as collage.
“Putting so much stress on modes of visual communication does not mean that The Iron Parachute is all form and not content. On the contrary, the book just manages to sail clear of the danger of touching on ‘nearly everything,’ to quote Bill Bryson. It touches, in fact, on many things between cabbages and kings: from human microbiology to the Solar System and beyond; it touches on evolution and the history of man, on the arts and warfare, on myth and science. It explores possible ways to communicate on these subjects by means of pictures and poetic language.”
Next year there will be a centenary of Dada to celebrate. I think I can claim some of the members of this movement for my ancestors as an artist.”
The release date for The Iron Parachute will soon be announced. To stay informed of the progress, sign up for the Oloris Publishing newsletter or follow Oloris on Facebook and Twitter.
