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Text of the page (random words):
aged gentlemen all of those things would occur to you it s part of the suspension of disbelief and it s a very very tricky thing i would never for instance have them pick up a telephone to talk to each other that would cut into the world that i have created in some way that i cannot exactly articulate but by making this little world with these two strange creatures in it i bring them to everybody all different kinds of people can enjoy that i want my work to appeal to everybody this is a conscious part of my thinking when i create my animal characters rollin is there another frog and toad in the plans lobel no i m not going to do any more i don t want them to become another commodity on the american scene but it also occurred to me when i was doing the last one that there was a certain cruelty in the relationship in frog being the controlling one and toad being controlled rollin it sounds as though they took on a life outside the books lobel well they did take on a life lots of authors have said that about their characters and frog and toad started to take on this life and i perceived something there that i didn t want to continue rollin how many i can read books have you done now lobel i ve written about twelve and illustrated many others when i first began to illustrate the i can read series was just beginning i was terribly lucky to walk in the door of harper s and they were looking for illustrators for all these manuscripts it could not have been more fortuitous rollin is it easier to illustrate one or to write one lobel to illustrate somebody else s manuscript is an entirely differ ent profession whether it s an i can read book or something else i want to keep doing both because i think both are very valuable every now and then some editor will say t have this wonderful manuscript but i didfft send it to you because i heard you weren t illustrating other people s manuscripts and you know say that s not true for financial reasons i don t want to do it exclusively but i certainly want to do it occasionally it s good for my talent and for a kind of security i can t always be a fountain of ideas if i have several years where i don t conceive of anything original i can always illustrate other people s work rollin when you do an i can read book do the editors supply you with the limited vocabulary they expect you to use l o b e l i understand there are some publishers who do that but harper s never would dream of that i have total freedom and t he only harness is that i am aware as i work that i m doing a reader if there are words i can t find a comfortable substitute for i ll put a big word in i ve used the word somersault and the word nervous there s one christmas story where toad decorates a tree i thought i could find a simpler way of saying that but i couldn t you could trim the tree but that s ambiguous you could put balls on the tree but that s even worse so we left it at decorate my theory is if the child is interested in the story he ll learn the words rollin do you get letters from children often l o b e l oh yes it s getting to be a big problem because i get lots of letters and i answer them i let them pile up and then i just take two or three days off and answer in the early days when i didn t get too many letters i would write a long letter and draw a little picture now they get a great big picture and a little letter sort of like joan crawford in hollywood a lot of teachers use it as a way to teach the letter format the funniest letter i ever got was a very beautifully written letter that the teacher had obviously written the form for on the blackboard it had the date in the right place and the salutation and then the body dear mr lobel i like your work very much etc a very sweet letter then it said love name i couldn t answer that one but why not use the letter that way it used to bother me but after all the child went to the library and picked me he could have written to any author rollin do you try to read the published criticism of your work l o b e l there isn t much published criticism about my work pub lishers are not very good about getting journal material to the author reviewing of children s books is almost nonexistent in the popular media except for christmas and i find that in the library organs often the quality of the reviewing is appallingly superficial i would prefer an intelligent bad review the most obvious is missed you ve worked long to create something and they say mr lobel s watercolors are very charming this is not reviewing rollin it seems to me sometimes that the most overused word in children s literature reviews is delightful lobel yes and yet children s books the best of them are not delightful my favorites anyway strike deep the artists that do the best ones are able to make them delightful on one level but that s just the whipped cream on top underneath there is something much more william steig for instance is a great favorite of mine his drawings look so effortless but his books deal with moral issues moral decisions that are really profound and i think children sense this underpinning and that the parents like the books too rollin are there other artists whose work you admire lobel beatrix potter for one obviously and lear and i learn a lot by looking not only at other children s book illustrators but at for example rembrandt right now i m illustrating a book about anton van leeuwenhoek who invented the microscope i wasn t enthusiastic at first but then i discovered he was a contemporary of rembrandt s so i m doing the book in the style of a rembrandt etching it won t look like a rembrandt etching i assure you but i have my rembrandt at my side as i m working and i look at it and i study it i often do that if there is a particular art period or an artist that i like and feel is appropriate i did that with as i was crossing boston common it was based on those 19th century besti aries i call that a handle it s a way of getting into something rollin maurice sendak has often spoken about the influence that disney cartoons had on his work have you been influenced by cartoons lobel well in my early work like mister muster the whole style was influenced by watching television over the heads of my chil dren that s all i was able to do in those days i was just beginning and i was glad i could do that i used to loathe my early books but now they re so far removed from me that i can see the charm in them rollin has your craft changed or your vision or can we separate them lobel i think it s a little of both i think i learned at some point to use myself at the beginning i was creating nice little stories for children which may have been an offshoot of being a parent i think that parenthood takes away from you some of whatever is creative it is very difficult to have children and create at the same time those early stories were just written for children and there s noth ing wrong with them they re funny and pleasant but after about ten years i realized that there was no reason w h y i couldn t stop writing for children and start writing more out of my own feelings i think that s how frog and toad came to be it was the first time i had turned inward it s a rather schizophrenic thing i cared about what the story would be for children but at the same time i was aware that all of the things that happened in it were essentially very personal to me and had resonances in my own life i don t think that had happened before i think possibly it was because the children were getting older and i had more time to be introspective and study the work of other artists that i liked and i realized that quality was missing in my own work i tell groups i speak to now that there s probably nothing more important than t h a t t o be able to create a children s book that s also important to you that is a self expression that isn t just done to amuse the children i won t be happy unless my books are amusing to adults as welt rollin sometimes adults are made very uncomfortable about some children s books though sendak s for instance lobel yes i think children are more comfortable with outside over there than a lot of adults i try not to intellectualize about my work too much though as i think perhaps sendak has in his inter views if i get into trouble then it helps to construct it in my mind intellectually and start again but i try to think of myself as an enter tainer primarily rollin you mentioned in your speech yesterday the similarity between children s books and the movies lobel in a book you are using pictures in a narrative way and the turning of the page is like a cut in a movie if a movie is well done and you re caught up in it even if you know the plot backwards and forwards you re still pulled along by a rhythm alfred hitchcock movies are a good example and in children s books the pictures have a rhythm from large to small for instance and sometimes really sequential pictures work but i wouldn t force that on some thing that i didn t think called for it rollin your self portraits in pigerichs are so interesting i t h i n k showing yourself as an artist l o b e l well i found that the children i talk to are absolutely fas cinated by the creative process they are not aware of other art forms particularly but they see it in picture books they know it s work in some way they see their parents go off to work and they know this is my work but their parents work seems very distant from them and what i m doing is work yet it s like play if i go to a classroom and give a little talk and then ask is there a question every hand shoots up and the questions are good questions not dopey ones they want to know how i do it how long it takes how many hours a day i work so in pigericks i felt if i just did forty pages of limericks there would be no depth so i used the self portraits as a framework i tried in a simple way to show that this was something that this person was creating and then he had created it finished it in whiskers and rhymes i think this kind of thing is unnecessary because some of those rhymes have enough depth to carry themselves you just deal with these things as they come along there s no way to anticipate problems like that rollin we ve talked mostly about your animal drawings do you think your drawings of people have changed over the years lobel i think i feel more confident drawing animals maybe it s because i ve done more of it but also i don t like drawing people in contemporary clothes there was a time when i was getting all these manuscripts about mommy and daddy in the kitchen they were like sitcoms on television and i wouldn t illustrate them because i didn t grow up in a suburban atmosphere i didn t have a mommy and daddy in the kitchen and i don t know what mommy and daddy are like in the kitchen any more anyway i think a book like that should be illustrated by somebody who has some kind of relationship to the material rollin what projects do you anticipate for the future lobel i m going to do a big mother goose book for random house rollin how do you feel about that so many people have done mother goose lobel yes i do feel ambivalent the other day i went into a book store and there was a line of mother goose books fifteen miles long so it ll be a challenge i suppose the best thing that can happen is that i have to think well all those poor people will be wild with jealousy when they see my mother goose that will be an incen tive to try anyway and i m the editor in this case i get to pick the ones i like like humpty dumpty rollin those are good incentives lobel you know i ve been doing this for twenty years and i m continually dissatisfied i make a religion of being dissatisfied i don t think there is a point in doing a book and saying isn t that wonderful then you don t learn when people ask what s the best book you ever did there s no point in saying oh that was four years ago that means everything since was worse right so i say it s the next book then you know even though i ve done the best book i think i can do i know the book i m going to do might be even better it s all delusion but it does keep one trying one s best posted by jon klassen at 12 13 pm 14 comments wednesday april 27 2011 i m trying something over here http jonklassen tumblr com posted by jon klassen at 3 41 pm 7 comments thursday july 1 2010 i m trying out a new technique using photographs of ink cutouts and messing with them a little in photoshop so far it s really really fun because its just a photograph you can move and arrange the pieces under the camera around all you want and add things from your front yard like little plants and things if i get good at this i m hoping to animate some things this way posted by jon klassen at 10 28 am 38 comments monday january 25 2010 bbc olympics 2010 you can see it a little bigger and much clearer if you go to the studio aka site i got to be the co designer on this spot for the bbc s coverage of the winter olympics the director on the project was marc craste whose work i have been watching since early college days between him and his team at studio aka you can t really ask for more on a job like this i thank them very much for picking me out and for solving all the problems after i got the fun part here is some of the work i turned in it should be noted that these were mostly done over marc s early previz work which was already great looking also all the character designs including the main guy and the animals are all marc s and here s a long strip of other ones like that one and the official credits for the spot comisioned by bbc red bee media agency rkcr y r director marc craste co designer jon klassen produced by studio aka more details and a nice clear version of the spot here http studioaka squarespace com latest news 2010 1 25 bbc winter olympics 2010 html update this spot has done very well out in the big wide world it won a bafta for best titles and a gold lion at cannes posted by jon klassen at 5 30 pm 51 comments tuesday january 19 2010 black lake black lake from david oreilly on vimeo i went to visit my good pal david o reilly in berlintown a little while ago and while i was there we started to make this the project was motivated by a show put on by the fine men who run itsnicethat called if you could collaborate which took place this past weekend in london the idea behind the show was to pick someone you hadn t worked with and work on something together when the show was launched david and me hadn t done the u2 video yet so it was born honestly enough anyway the result is something we re both really happy with the brunt of the workload turned out to be on david i was in on the conceptualizing of the thing sort of the visual rules and value setups and stuff and then designing the elements and david took it from there since it was made to be shown in a gallery it s meant to be played on a loop you can do this if you follow the vimeo link here s some of th...