The Wayside 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 and yet also offering 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. Dramatic, poetic, heavy with symbolism, Morstad's drawings speak for themselves, exploring femininity, identity, and personal mythologies that interested her in her first Drawn & Quarterly book, Milk Teeth.