Book launch–Julie Morstad, The Wayside at Lucky’s, Nov 3

– by Brendan Fairweather

On Saturday Nov 3, Lucky’s Comics (3972 Main Street) in Vancouver will host an evening release party for Julie Morstad’s most recent book, The Wayside.

The hardcover, published by Drawn + Quarterly, features all new illustrations from the Vancouver-based artist. The launch marks Morstad’s second release with D + Q after 2011’s Milk Teeth. Milk Teeth was the first in the Montreal publisher’s petit-livre series to go back to print after quickly selling out.

The new book is a collection of pen and ink drawings as well as collage-like mixed media pieces. A short write-up on the Drawn + Quarterly website describes the book:

Within these pages, Morstad’s worlds unite, maintaining their ethereal, almost fairy-tale beauty while also achieving a loose overarching synthesis through thematic and visual commonalities. The work found herein combines the delicate line of Edward Gorey with the color palette of Marcel Dzama, and emerges as something utterly unique: a combination of the two with the spirit of Virginia Woolf. Similar to her first D+Q book, Milk Teeth, Morstad’s drawings–dramatic, poetic, and heavy with symbolism–speak for themselves, exploring femininity, identity, and personal mythologies.

Morstad is an artist, illustrator and animator who works mostly on children’s books and drawings. Her work has a playful and childlike tone with a hint of surrealism. The fine-line drawings and mixed-media collages give her work great diversity.

She has also done some animation, including a collaboration with her brother Paul Morstad on the music video for the Neko Case song “People Got a Lotta Nerve”.

Illustration by Julie Morstad from The Wayside.