Altered States | Julia Munsey
- | North gallery
Admission Free
Booking is recommended
"I have had the privilege of watching Julia paint … her drawing is Italianate, her touch secure and the result is delightful." – Francis Hoyland
"The drawings and paintings of still figures are yet full of life, … a naked mother and her two babies are almost aquiver with interaction, but her hand must blur as she gets down their images of models fighting or dancing together.
Julia’s work progresses through the winding path of her life. Her psychoanalytic training has strengthened her insight into human character so that with minimal lines she is able to bring out movement in an otherwise still subject." – Simon Tait, former Arts Correspondent of The Times.
Julia Munsey trained at The Slade School of Art under the tuition of Euan Uglow. After teaching at Maidstone School of Art she then trained as a Jungian psychotherapist. It was after seeing an article about the opening of the Prince’s Drawing School that Munsey re-immersed herself in the world of drawing and enrolled at the school.
In order to capture the intense movement of the body, Munsey vigorously studies her subjects, often dancers or performers as they twist and turn through space … only then is it that she begins to draw as much of the body that captures her attention.
The dissonance between the precise marks of the artist and the fleeting, ephemeral movements of the performing dancers manifests itself in layered, tableauesque portraits.
Multiple bodies, perspectives and lines evoke a dream-like sense where dramatic form inhabits a nonspecific space. There is a balance within the work between the lessening of detail of features against the definite curves of the body.