One bright day in the dark of night you look at your reflection in a window and see the back of your head. You try on a hat that floats in the air and leads you to a place where anything is possible and everything is impossible. This is not the “real” world. You have entered a “surreal” world of visual surprises.

These are the words of D.B. Johnson, the artist and writer of Magritte’s Marvelous Hat, and which clearly speak for the magical world of children’s book art. Opening tomorrow at Society of Illustrators is the annual exhibition celebrating these artists, including Mr. Johnson. This year, among the standouts are several picture books about artists—both real and imagined—and about what it means to be an artist.

From the poverty and grit experienced by Bill Traylor, the son of freed slaves and a self-taught artist who was discovered on a sidewalk in Montgomery, Alabama around 1940, to the previously mentioned Rene Magritte to a child painter whose dog becomes a painter to Henri Matisse to Andy Warhol, there is plenty of inspiration to be found in this show.

In It Jes' Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw (Lee & Low Books, above), R. Gregory Christie envisions the hardscrabble world of Bill Traylor from childhood on. As a youngster, Bill worked in the cotton fields to help his family put food on the table. At the end of a long hot day, he and his friends would take a dip in the cool water of the Alabama River and wave to passing stern-wheelers. “Without realizing it," the text reads, "Bill saved up memories of these times deep inside himself.”

Christie’s art evokes the dusty South of the sharecropper’s life, and pays homage to Bill Traylor’s signature style. He visually maps out the loneliness Bill felt when as an elderly man he lived homeless on the streets of Montgomery; and the joy he felt when one day he began to make drawings. “Bill could not contain his memories. One day in 1939 he picked up the stub of a pencil and a piece of discarded paper and began to pour out his memories in pictures.”

At the opposite side of the spectrum is D.B. Johnson’s story, Magritte’s Marvelous Hat (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children), about a floating hat that found Magritte and enabled him to create paintings in which the world was turned inside out to become a place where anything is possible. Because he believed in magic, Johnson suggests, everything was possible for the artist.

This year the Founder’s Award (for a promising new artist who has published three or fewer books to date) goes to the Brothers Hilt for The Insomniacs (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, above). The artists created a mysterious wonderland of night, where a family that stopped being able to sleep after they moved across 12 time zones for the mother's new job. So they “gave night a try” to manage their problem. “At dusk they awoke and ate a breakfast of nightshade vegetables. They dressed in shades of midnight blue. The planets wheeled around the night sky while the Insomniacs toiled in the gloom. Father developed his photographs in a darkroom. Mother studied stars through her telescope, and Mika attended night school remotely.” The book is a beautiful evocation of the mystery of nighttime, rendered in velvety deep shades of blue. But you should see the original art!

The Original Art: 32^nd Annual Exhibition continues at the Society of Illustrators through December 22^nd. 128 East 63^rd Street, NY, NY. Information.