By Julie Morstad
Julie Morstad has long excelled at illustration, often working in tandem with children’s writers, but in The Wayside, the storytelling potential of her fantastical pictures is fully realized. 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.