Julie Morstad

Julie Morstad's work is melancholy in a romantic, beautiful and surreal way. In an interview with the Georgia Strait, Morstad describes some of her favourite themes:

Interviewers, meanwhile, have been quick to play up the importance of the disembodied heads that appear in her work. But the decorative noggins aren't meant to imply the violence of decapitation—even though, as a child, Morstad was obsessed with Marie Antoinette. “They're more like faces representing something,” she says. “They're heads without bodies, rather than decapitated heads. They're not intended to be something that's dead.”

Birds and animals also figure prominently in her work, for the simple reason that she likes drawing feathers and fur. “Usually I just think of something I would really want to draw,” says Morstad. “Cascading hair, heads, and faces, eyes, whatever—I'll figure out what it means later, if it means anything.”

Drawn & Quarterly has recently published a collection of her illustrations. "Milk Teeth" will be released tomorrow at Luckys, Vancouver. This coming Saturday, artwork from her book "When you were Small" will be exhibited at Atelier Gallery in Vancouver. (You can take a peek inside Morstad's sketchbook at Julia Rothman's marvelous "Book by Its Cover" blog.)