Winning the Draw by Simon Tait
The Art of Julia Munsey

“You have to draw,” says Julia Munsey. “And you have to keep drawing.” And so, through an artist’s career of more than half a century, she is never without a sketch pad and pencil to hand.

 But Julia Munsey has not had a conventional career; her first solo exhibition was not until 2018 and she had to be talked into it. And what it showed was the line, colour, tone and composition of an artist supremely confident in her use of the material to make what she sees. An acrylic painting, called Gender, is a nude drawn directly in paint, with no pencil guidelines but infinitely subtle modelling to create a still figure that is full of life and movement, the background surface blocked out with colour to add to the model’s vitality.

 Julia Munsey, she says herself, has been very lucky, and that unconventional career path showed itself early on. Her father was a doctor, her mother a concert pianist, and neither wanted an artist’s life for their daughter. “I think my mother rather hopefully thought I would grow out of it, but I was very determined in my way”.

 But they did have the imagination to send her to Dartington Hall School, the progressive co-educational school near Totnes in Devon, where her precocious drawing talent was encouraged, so much so that at 17 she was accepted at Plymouth College of Art to study fine art. “I had a lovely time there, in those days it was down on the Barbican with the most glorious sea views”. The college also had strong connections further west in Cornwall with the then thriving St Ives school of painters, and she drew encouragement from them too.

 Before long, however, she had left the seascapes behind her with a scholarship to study at The Slade School of Art in London. “A family friend had a house in Paddington where I could stay, and when I arrived I knew I never wanted to live anywhere else,” she says.

 At the Slade she came under the tutelage of the distinguished painter and teacher Euan Uglow. “I wasn’t a particular admirer of his work then - though I am now - and what I think I got from him was a sense of discipline,” she recalls. “We had to draw from life every day for two years, and it was hard work with the results being often rather static”. She was one of the first to experiment with acrylic paint while she was there, identifying the only importer of the paint from Europe at the time. “It was rather pale then, needed gingering up a bit, but it was wonderfully easy to use, straight onto the paper – I hated oil, it takes so long to dry,” she says.

 On graduation she moved, as many artists in the late 1960s and 70s did then when finding studios and galleries to represent them was so difficult, commuting to the independent Maidstone College of Art from London. “Living was so much cheaper then, and one only had to do two days’ teaching a week to make ends meet,” Julia says.

 And then came a switch, in her mid-30s. By now married to the composer and film maker Adrian Munsey, and with three small children, she picked a totally different career. “I got very interested in psychoanalysis,” she explains. “I always had been, my father being a doctor had a lot of interest in it, and I think I wanted something more permanent that I could be involved with, working with other people rather than on my own”.

 She qualified as a psychotherapist and had her own practice at her home for ten years, during part of which she was a department head at City & East London College, a further education institution. Her time there coincided with the Eritrean crisis when thousands of refugees from the troubled state on the Horn of Africa. “We had a number of them, and they were so beautiful – tall and graceful – and all the trouble they had seen didn’t seem to affect their serene manner. They were wonderful to draw”.

 Because the sketch pad had never been put away, and while she was on a holiday in the United States in the early 2000s she saw an article in an architectural magazine about the Prince of Wales. “He could see drawing dying in art schools and didn’t want it to happen,” Julia recalls. “So he was starting a drawing school, and it was wonderful of him to do and perfect for me.”

 And she is still going, under the guidance of the painter and teacher Francis Hoyland. “I have had the privilege of watching Julia paint” he says. “Her drawing is Italianate, her touch secure and the result is delightful”.

 The drawings and paintings of still figures are yet full of life, and a pencil and conté naked mother and her two babies are almost aquiver with interaction, but her hand must blur as she gets down there images of models fighting or dancing together, and the tension of two wrestlers is palpable – “they love having an audience and I think they play to us a bit when we're drawing them”.

 She loves to draw movement, and though ballet class is not interesting enough for her, she longs to find a circus school where she can take their strenuous activity onto the page. “It’s difficult because they tend to be too high up to get close enough, but when they are on the ground chatting to each other, they’re still exercising their muscles and giving movement,” she says.

 Julia’s work progresses though the winding path of her life. Her psychanalytic 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. She has no studio, preferring to take her equipment off on a trolley to Hyde Park, say, and make her work there, combining men snoozing on benches, mothers pushing prams, and children playing – sometimes enhanced with cherubs’ wings “because they look like they ought to have them” on a single page.

 It is in the class at the Prince’s Drawing School she feels truly at home. “The models are so good, but it's working with other artists around that I find stimulating, and I’m at home there,” she says.

Simon Tait is the editor of Arts Industry magazine, a former arts correspondent for The Times, a critic for the London Magazine and a former president of the Critics’ Circle.