Jon Klassen on absence, the look just off-frame, and not over-explaining

Jon Klassen agreed to meet us at his Halifax studio in early April. He had just returned from a residency in Quebec and was working on what he described, with characteristic understatement, as “another book about a hat.” The conversation took place over the course of an afternoon, with brief interruptions for tea and a dog that wandered in from the next room and stayed for about twenty minutes of the discussion.

Nightnight.art: A line you’ve used in talks: “the picture is everything I’m not saying.” Could you say more?

Klassen: The page has the picture and it has the words. If the words say what the picture is showing, you’ve doubled up. You’ve told the child the same thing twice. The child notices. The child reads the page once.

NN: What’s the alternative?

Klassen: The picture shows what is happening. The words describe what someone feels about what is happening. Or the words describe something that is not in the picture — something earlier, something later, something that the character does not realize. The gap between the words and the picture is where the picture book lives.

NN: The off-frame glance. The thing the rabbit is looking at that we never see. That’s become a signature.

Klassen: (laughs) It is the cheapest, easiest trick. If I draw a rabbit looking off the page, the reader’s eye follows the rabbit’s eye. The reader’s brain fills in something the reader cannot quite name. The page becomes more interesting than I am. I take the credit.

NN: How did you discover this?

Klassen: I drew a rabbit by accident with its eyes slightly to the left of the frame instead of forward. I noticed I kept coming back to that page. I assumed it was a fluke. I tried it again the next week. Same effect. I started doing it on purpose around 2009. I Want My Hat Back (2011) is built almost entirely on it.

On absence

NN: You’ve said you think absence is more useful than presence in a picture book.

Klassen: Yes. A page where everyone is on the page is a closed page. A page where someone is missing is an open page. The reader has to ask where the missing one is. A child especially has to ask. The child is doing the work of the book. That is what you want.

NN: Is this why you favor empty backgrounds?

Klassen: Partly. An empty background lets you stage the next thing. If the background is full of detail, the next page has to compete with it. If the background is plain, the next page can do whatever it wants. Restraint on page 12 buys freedom on page 14.

On AI

NN: I have to ask. Where are you, currently, on generative-image tools?

Klassen: (long pause) I have used them. I will tell you a true thing about them.

NN: Please.

Klassen: They are extremely good at competence. They are extremely bad at restraint. Every AI image I have generated has too much in it. Too many flowers in the field. Too much detail in the curtain. Too many stars in the sky. The system does not understand that the point of the page is what isn’t there. It cannot be taught this, because the data it was trained on rewards visual density. The internet rewards visual density. Picture books do not.

NN: So you don’t use them.

Klassen: I have used them as a kind of mood board. I have used them to generate ten variations of a background so I can see what I don’t want. They are useful for that. They are not useful for producing the final page. The final page requires removing things, and these systems can only add.

NN: Could that change?

Klassen: I don’t know. Possibly. If someone trains a model on, you know, Komako Sakai and the late Edward Gorey and Wanda Gág and nothing else, that model might learn restraint. But the model that is trained on everything on the internet will not. Restraint is a minority position. The internet is a majority document.

On the over-explainer

NN: Common mistake among new picture-book illustrators?

Klassen: Over-explaining. The mouse is sad. The text says “the mouse was sad.” Then the next page: “and the mouse felt very sad indeed.” Then a parent reading the book aloud is being asked to perform sadness twice and the child has nowhere to go with it. The picture should do the sad. The text can do something else — what the mouse was thinking, what the mouse was remembering, anything except what the picture already shows.

NN: How do you catch this in your own work?

Klassen: I write the text first, with no pictures in mind. Then I do the pictures, with no text in mind. Then I put them together and find every place where they overlap and cut one of the two. Almost always I cut the text. The picture is more efficient at the job.

A small thing about hats

NN: Three books about hats. I Want My Hat Back. This Is Not My Hat. We Found a Hat. Is there a fourth?

Klassen: (grins) Yes. There will be a fourth. I will not tell you what it is about. But it is about a hat.

NN: Why hats?

Klassen: A hat is the smallest object that can be a story. You can lose a hat. You can find a hat. You can steal a hat. You can share a hat. Three of those have books. The fourth is something I am still figuring out. It will be one of the four. It will be a hat.

— Jon Klassen’s most recent book is “The Skull” (Candlewick, 2023). The interview was recorded at his studio in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on April 18, 2026.