The Tim Hildebrandt Memorial

The following was adapted by John Dods from the Eulogy he gave at Tim Hildebrandt's Funeral Mass at St. Brigid's Church in Peapack, NJ 6/17/2006 Tim Hildebrandt (1939-2006): The Man Who Loved Clouds by John Dods

It's hard to sum up Tim Hildebrandt in a few words, but if you look at his paintings, you learn so much about him in a glance. You learn that his imagination was inexhaustible. That he found color, light, and beauty of vital importance. That he was not very comfortable in this world, but was extraordinarily expert at inventing better ones. That he viewed Nature as a magnificent cathedral.

The colors of Tim's art often had a piercing intensity, and the Technicolor-like Cadmium reds and yellows seemed the perfect choice for a man whose imagination was on fire. His compositional skills were prodigious, recalling one of his idols, Gustov Dore. Publishers loved his ability to design vivid book covers with a striking and hypnotic visual impact; Author Harlen Ellison once told Tim: "I must have read a hundred crappy books because of your damn covers!" It is hard to look away from a Tim Hildebrandt image - hard to resist the desire to enter that world and remain there.

His masterful ability to evoke nature's light fills his work - sunlight, moonlight, sunbeams, light reflecting on the water - radiant, breathtaking, glowing, shimmering images infused with light - images sometimes seeming even more sunlit than sunlight itself. Author Alan Dean Foster said of Tim's work: "I am put in mind of Maxfield Parrish working with lasers instead of brushes...bursts of color and intensity slam into the optic nerve and insist you must look."

You could say he was talented. How many artists could paint images with three colors of light coming from three different sources? A master craftsman, Tim's lighting design for "At The Grey Heavens" - which he painted with his brother Greg - has cool Moonlight (from behind), warm Torchlight (from the side), and reflected sources of light (from below). Technically astonishing, it stands with "The Pillars of the Kings", "Old Man Willow", "Mowdra", "Chryslandon", "Cirith Ungol", and "The Dark Tower" as one of the towering keystones of modern illustration.

He accomplished so much. Tim was one-half of the brother team that produced some of the most famous art since Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell. Tim and Greg - "The Brothers Hildebrandt" - created the original STAR WARS movie poster and it became one of the world's most reproduced images. They created the artwork for the best-selling calendar series "The Lord of the Rings" and set sales records - no calendar had ever sold one million copies before. Then followed the N.Y. Times Bestsellers, "Urshurak" and "Sword of Shannara", and the Gold Metal from the Society of Illustrators. The book "Greg and Tim Hildebrandt: The Tolkien Years" has been translated into eight languages.

Working solo, between 1981-1993, Tim painted fifty-two calendar illustrations, dozens of book and magazine covers, and won the artist the Merit Award from the Society of Illustrators in 1987. A recent Google search for "Tim Hildebrandt" revealed over 75,000 websites, many of which have his works continuously on display.

The night that Tim died, there was a full moon outside the New Jersey hospital - luminous, large, and framed with edge-lit clouds, it looked so much like the moon Tim had painted for "At The Grey Havens" many years earlier. It seemed like nature's tribute to Tim as he left Middle Earth to continue his journey on the "Road that goes ever on and on" as Tolkein called it.

I got to know Tim in 1982 when he executive produced THE DEADLY SPAWN - that low low budget movie - which we filmed with a few thousand dollars of Hildebrandt money. During the production, many of the crew found themselves posing as the mermaids, wizards, and dwarfs for the "Realms of Wonder" calendar images and Rita Hildebrandt's "Fantasy Cookbook".

Tim loved making movies - he was a filmmaker at his core. For him, there was simply was no better way for time to be spent. He and Greg had made 16-mm films for Bishop Fulton Sheen in 1960's - and much earlier than that when he and Greg built miniature cities in their garage, then blew them up, to create their own 8MM version of George Pal's WAR OF THE WORLDS. During THE DEADLY SPAWN, he painted monsters, built miniature sets, loaned us his money, his house, and his son Charles. Most importantly, he gave us his enthusiasm - that inexhaustible fuel we so desperately needed to keep the project going over the two long years it took us to finish it.

THE DEADLY SPAWN was a success. The week that THE DEADLY SPAWN was released to dvd on Amazon.com, it outsold THE BLOB, and (briefly) Steven Spielberg's JAWS. One reviewer called the film "A marvel of imaginative low-budget filmmaking." Another called it "An Eighties Classic", and another said: "It has a sort of timeless quality that all B-movies should have". The film that cost eight thousand dollars, ended up on six magazine covers, was reviewed by "People Magazine" and "The New York Times" - was followed by a soundtrack record, a videotape release, a special edition dvd, a compact disc, a model kit, t-shirts, and very recently, a hand puppet. Tim lived to participate in recording the commentary track heard on THE DEADLY SPAWN special edition dvd. He would talk about THE DEADLY SPAWN experience tirelessly anywhere, anytime, with the breathless excitement of a boy describing his first day at "Walt Disney World".

And there was the man who loved clouds... If you ever drove in a car with Tim, you probably know how much he loved nature - clouds in particular. He was a cloud enthusiast, a fervent and dedicated cloud connoisseur, maybe a cloud junkie. But, he never saw Cumulous clouds - or Nimbus clouds - there were "Albert Whitlock clouds", "Harrison Ellenshaw clouds", "Peter Ellenshaw clouds" - all matte painters for big Hollywood movies - and he knew all of their names. There were Disney "Multi-plane Camera clouds". "Look!" he would exclaim, making sharp pointing movements at the sky, "Parting of the Red Sea Clouds" or "N.C. Wyeth clouds!" Volumes of cloud reference material filled his library and the bookshelves bowed under the weight of the tall stacks of "National Geographic" and "Arizona Highways" magazines. His capacity for cloud enjoyment seemed unlimited - who else do you know that schedules time each day in the summer to sit and look at clouds? After moving to Texas in 2005, he often enthused over the spectacular cloudscapes of the open skies of San Antonio.

Tim's enthusiasm could be alarming - often seeming itself to be like an force of nature in its intensity and power. I felt inadequate by comparison. I completely love clouds - but my enthusiasm was a lit match next to his Mount Vesuvius erupting day and night - never stopping. People loved Tim as much for his passion as for his talent. His excitement could be addictive and it was exciting to be around him when he was excited.

When I feel sad about loosing Tim, I remember how much of him is still here - in his paintings. When I look at his work today, I feel the same elation and excitement that I felt 30 years ago, when I first saw his art - the wonderful feeling of living in a Tim Hildebrandt Universe: A fantastic world of endless beauty, where the ordinary doesn't exist, Where your worst problem is likely to be a dragon encounter, Where fantastic creatures are bathed in luminous color and dazzling light, Where nature's magnificence is in every landscape, in every tree, in every rock, and in all the clouds that fill the sky.

As Alan Dean Foster said: "It's one thing to be a painter and another to be an artist" Copyright John Dods 6/17/06

used with permission.

F. Wesley Schneider - Associate Editor Dragon Magazine

"Whether defining the look of Middle Earth and Star Wars, or indulging his vibrant imagination with Urshurak, Magic: The Gathering, or on our own covers, Tim Hildebrandt has created some of the most recognizable fantasy images in existence and his vibrant style and inspiring imagery will surely not be forgotten. All of us here at Dragon magazine would like to expresses our most sincere condolences on his passing." 6/17/06