Interview with Jon Klassen

By Nate Williams

• Your Name: Jon Klassen
• Location: Los Angeles, Ca.
• Web Links: www.burstofbeaden.com
• Influences/Inspiration: folk tales, inanimate objects
• Top 5 favorite things in life: baths, perogies, digital watches, new socks, electric blankets
• Top 5 bands/singers: Harry Nilsson, Burl Ives, Anne Laplantine, Otis Redding, Grizzly Bear

When I first saw your work it was very refreshing.  There was no artist I could really compare it to.  Is being unique important to you?

thanks! i think that probably owes more to a lot of far flung influences than making uniqueness a goal. i kind of feel like if you just do what you want, it usually ends up being sort of on its own because its your take. even if the subject is completely overdone, if you focus on what you like about it, it cant really help being something new.  

How do avoid following trends/cliches?

its hard, because usually those things become popular because they resonate with people, so obviously there’s something there. i’m not totally sure its bad to avoid them completely. sometimes you can start with an idea that you know has been done to death but while you’re doing it, you turn a corner you hadn’t thought of and it comes out not being about the subject you started with at all. as long as you keep in mind that you dont have to live up to what you’ve seen before, then you can usually let go of what other people did and go off by yourself.

You’re work is looks fantastic animated.  Do you like doing animations? How much creative control did you have when your work was animated say for example with the ROYAL BANK piece.

thanks! i like doing animations very much. a lot of my favorite work by other people has to do with putting subjects in a new context that is unexpected, and animation has so many ways of doing that. just putting music to something gives you so many chances to tell what the picture is about. 

I had quite a lot of creative freedom with the Royal Bank piece. The director gave me storyboards that had the information and basic settings they wanted to cover, (the water globe, icebergs, forest, etc) and they just took what i gave them based on those requirements. That spot is actually a terrible example of me trying to be “unique”, though – the ending especially owes a lot to Charles Harper. He was so good at getting nature down to simple shapes…ripping him off almost couldn’t be helped for that segment. The middle bit, with the iceberg and the penguins and things, i think is closer to my stuff and the kind of animation i would really like to do more of. I should point out that i didn’t do any of the animation on the piece – that was done at a shop called ‘Convert’ in new york. the most i got into the animation was drawing arrows where the penguins could dive and stuff that was pretty layout-specific. They did an amazing job making the whole thing move around. 

You’re work seems like you had studied print making at one point … is this true?

I have really limited experience with silkscreening and printmaking – I went to school for animation,  but there were many nights i wandered over to the textiles wing of the school and thought of dropping animation for that. There’s a level of planning and economy that goes into that stuff that i admire very much. 

You have serveral pieces where you include lettering. Do you like creating lettering? why?

I really like drawing letters. I think that goes back to the question about things that are cliche – there’s nothing more familiar than letters, but thats why its so fun to draw them yourself. You can’t help but communicate something when you draw letters, because people are going to read what it says, but just by drawing them yourself, you’ve added to it and its yours. Plus there’s the whole other side of typography and fonts – all this technical thinking and beautiful design work going into something that’s completely in the service of whatever someone else is going to spell out with it. i like that a lot. 

Which illustrators/artists inspire you? Why?

 I tend to like work that tries to tell stories, or at least sets the stage where you can picture a story happening. Most of the people i like are very talented designers, but are smart enough to put the subject or story first, and then apply their skills to it. I like Bruegel very much, a lot of old Russian painters like Levitan and Repin. Goya is really good. I also like more modern stuff – Saul Bass and Ben Shahn. I watch a lot of Stanley Kubrick movies and more recently a lot of David Lynch, but those guys are high on a lot of lists, i guess. As for newer stuff, I’m on a blog with some of my favorite people – Drew Beckmeyer and Max Holyoke-Hirsch and Luke Best. Another thing most of those guys have in common, Kubrick especially, is that they take a long view of things that don’t quite add up all the way. There’s often something mysterious going on, but its executed very straightforwardly and literally, so as the viewer you end up looking around and sort of getting into it on your own, rather than them telling you where to look. It’s a great way of telling stories, because by the time you get to where the picture was meant to take you, you’ve done all the walking yourself and its a lot more personal. I’m trying to figure out how to do that in my own work…

What are you currently working on? what are you looking forward to?

I work at an animation studio right now on things that won’t come out for years and years. Its a good job, because you learn a lot and the people here are very good at what they do – creatively, though, it can sometimes feel like the equivalent of emptying a glass of water into a lake, so I am trying to keep up my own stuff and eventually make it more a part of how i pay the rent. I am the only one in this situation ever in history.

Your work looks sophisticated but you have many examples where you use humor (Storming the capital) Do you feel like your style allows you to express anything? or do you feel it is good for some things and not others?

I think its good to keep a loose reign on your style and focus on what you want to think about. People often mistake approach for style, but there’s a big difference. If you work on how you approach or explore a subject in your head, how you solve a problem, then you wont get caught thinking up something that doesn’t fit your style, because the idea is the style. I think I’m actually kind of inconsistent, stylistically. That probably gets tighter as you get older, at least i hope it does, but in the meantime i try and keep sort of a plan of attack, a very loose one, for the ideas. It really is like a battle because you have this vague goal of getting something done that you like, but your skills and tools are doing things and hitting walls you didnt anticipate, so you have to regroup and figure out how you’re going to get around it. If you go into a mess like that with style as your only weapon, you get killed so fast!