It is a Wednesday morning in Blackwell’s bookshop and the café is full. The table in front of me is flooded: pencils, scattered scrap papers, flowers folded into greeting cards, thick reading glasses parted from their case (and its decorative penis sticker), a magnifying glass, an eye patch. I try to clear an alcove from the pencil ocean for my cappuccino. In the artist’s absence – she’s bustled off to send an email – I seem to have inherited her studio.
I’m here to interview Julia Whatley, the white-haired, eye patch-wearing, (table-hogging?) artist I sometimes glimpse, hunched over her notebooks, in Blackwell’s Nero. Apparently I am a less captivating figure to her; when she returns, she’s forgotten my name: “I have a mind like Swiss cheese – full of holes.” She assures me, though, that she is far more lucid in her art: “it comes to me effortlessly… I’m just the flesh lump that gets in the way of the vision”. As she talks, it becomes evident she means this quite literally. Julia sees herself as the conduit through which an artistic vision is realised. Where does this vision come from? “Somewhere else.” In fact, she confesses: “I feel very much not of this world.”
A critic once wrote that Julia’s art comes from a gentler age. It is easy to see what they meant: Julia’s pieces are buoyed by the fantastical and carnivalesque, relics from a world of childhood imagination. Is this the somewhere else Julia never left? Reflecting on her own childhood, she remembers looking out at the reality from a realm of fantasy; to Julia and her siblings: “Alice in Wonderland was our world”, and she remembers being captivated by John Tenniel’s illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s classic novel. Having attended Winchester School of Art and Goldsmith’s College, Julia pursued a career as a professional illustrator herself, in the course of which she has illustrated the Royal Ballet Sinfonia orchestra and rehearsals of prestigious ballerinas at the Royal Opera House, including Sylvie Guillem. Watching them dance was mesmerising, she recalls. Traces of them still dance across her sketchbooks today – feathery tutus and ribboned calves, the effortless dynamism that seems to animate all her subjects. I cannot help but think of Degas’ ballerinas, though the fluidity of her line and penchant for collage owe more to Matisse.
At 70, Julia says, she is no longer interested in commercial illustration. What drives her now is not financial, or even reputational, interest. It is something far more altruistic: humanitarian and vaguely spiritual. To understand Julia’s art – to understand Julia – is to step into her fantastical somewhere else, and to look back at our imperfect world from there. I try to do this as she tells me her plan. When Julia’s project (which she calls Gadfly) is up and running, she intends the sales of her drawings to fund art supplies for children across the world, especially for those most in need. She tells me: “Children aren’t respected. We need to respect the mysticism of children.” This will change everything. It is hard to tell how literally Julia believes this. She talks to me earnestly about a future where unnamed billionaires download digital scans of her art, while she sends paper to far flung, war-torn nations. She invites me to believe with her. That we can raise a generation that channels pain through creative mediums, who speak and are understood. In the rock, paper, scissors of the world, Julia is betting on paper. But in the collage of our conversation, I sense we have veered from the rugged edge of reality into one of her dreamlike compositions.
Real world aside, her generosity of worldview is uncontestably genuine. When I ask where her intricate designs and whimsical enchantment come from, she does not seem to understand what I mean: “the artworks come from my mind; my mind is like that.” It is simply how she sees the world. Julia sits above the bookshop making a beautiful world, one drawing at a time. If we peer through her page-shaped windows perhaps we can also catch a glimpse.
