Round

Anna Ryan

Interview by L. Valena

First of all, can you describe to me what you responded to?

I was so excited to get a quilt block! I knew what it was immediately, because I come from a family of really big quilters. My grandma quilted, my mom quilted, and I used to quilt before my fingers stopped working very well. It’s the star pattern— a really traditional quilt block. It’s one that normally a lot of women would get together and everyone would make their own quilt block, and then put them all together. My grandma had a quilt like that, which was on her bed.

When I saw it, the first thing I thought of was my family. I was remembering all these women in my family, sitting together with their cigarettes, chain smoking and sewing and crocheting. Putting their cigarettes down on the couch, and now are there holes in the couch. Someone set their cigarette down in the yarn, and now the yarn is on fire... you know. Everyone’s bullshitting, and having a good time. Telling stories and stuff. We went to my grandmother’s house two times a year, in southern Illinois— really rural. Corn farming. She was from the place where the John Deere tractor was from. There’s nothing in Moline except John Deere stuff. They’re very proud of it. We’d go there for three months in the summer, and for a month every winter, on school break. It was very cyclical for me.

My mom was a homemaker, so she would spend all summer, and all during the winter, taking care of me and my cousins. She was from a huge family- one of eleven kids. So it was her and my grandma, and they would get all of the kids, and pack them all into the house, and that was what they did. They would watch all of the kids while we were out of school. That’s what I was responding to. This kind of circle.

In the summertime they would send us to the creek across from my grandma’s house, and they’d let us go and catch the turtles. I don’t know if you know this, but all turtles have thirteen big pieces of the shell on the top, and there are thirteen moons in a year. So each of those correspond to different cycles. And then the little pieces of the shell, and I don’t remember what they’re called in English, correspond to the different days of the month. So there’s 28 on the outside. So there’s the moons, and the days of each lunar cycle.

WHAT?!

Yeah! It’s a whole ass calendar on the back of the turtle. I remember being a little kid, catching one of these turtles, and my grandma sitting me down and showing me the whole calendar. The cold moon, the bony moon (because you have to eat the bones when there’s nothing else to eat), the windy moon, the flower moon when the flowers come up. You go through all these different cycles.

I was so excited, I decided to take one to show my teacher. So we got back to Arizona, I caught myself a desert tortoise, and brought it into school. I was so excited to show my teacher. And she was like: “one, you can’t bring in a desert tortoise- that’s a protected animal! And, two, that thing is covered with salmonella! You have to get it out of the school.” I was heartbroken. I had wanted to bring it into class, because we were learning about calendars, and I wanted to show them how the calendar was wrong. “You get the real calendar from a turtle!” and they were like, no, you get salmonella from a turtle. Apparently you can do both.

Do you know how a turtle shell grows? They start out with a little tiny piece, and then that piece grows, and it grows. So it’s like a plate that grows on top of each plate. It has a sheet, and then that sheet grows into a bigger sheet. So if you look at a turtle, each of those sheets grows into a bigger sheet on top of it- you can count them like the rings of a tree. So you can see how old a turtle is just by counting the layers of the shell. They’re awesome creatures.

Little founts of information!

I always think about that with quilting too. You have to do it one little piece at a time, and you have to fit each of them together. It covers more and more as each person adds to it. I always thought that was great. You have this whole thing, that covers everybody, and keeps everybody safe and warm and together. And the way you finish— you have your little hoop, and you have to sew through the whole thing. Turtles, similarly, have a fold in the bottom of their shell. It kind of reminds me of that. It’s like a whole little seam along the bottom, where they fold up.

With my turtle in particular, I wanted to talk about these specific cycles. Mine was a little bit more loose. I took some in-process pictures with my cat, because he has to lay on top of things while I’m working. At one point I was trying to roll out the linoleum, and he was laying in the ink. Are you kidding me?

Do you want to talk more about how you made this piece?

There’s a picture I was thinking of before I even started thinking about all the quilts and stuff. It’s a picture of my grandma’s dad and uncle, and her grandma, all sitting together with her little brother or cousin. I don’t even know, because our family is huge. There’s a lot of them. And all it says on the back of the photo is ‘Grandma’, so that’s helpful. I had to figure out the rest by asking a million people, “Do you know who the rest of these people are?” She passed away two years ago, and I was trying to figure out how else would know who is in the photo. It was taken in the 30’s on a reservation in Oklahoma. They’re sitting in front of a blanket, it’s a quilted blanket. Some of those blocks that have that pattern are in the blanket. It feels like that photo was part of the process, even though it didn’t end up in the final work.

I drew it all out. It starts in the top left corner, and it goes around. Cold, bony, wind, flower, and then at the bottom is ‘planting’. Not in Arizona, because you plant things year-round. That’s the one that has the little corn seed. Usually, that whole right side of the shell would be all different phases of corn. Corn seeds, the corn and tassel, the corn budding, and the corn maturing. The Cherokee really like their corn. Like, a lot. Most of the moons there are corn-based moons. But my grandmother was really fond of strawberries. So that was what I put in there on the bottom, next to the planting, because that was what we did in June. When we got to Grandma’s house, the first thing we did was raid her garden for all of her strawberries. And she would come out and yell at us. She’d say, “the first thing you do is eat all my strawberries!” and we’d say “It’s because we love you so much, and you grow the best strawberries! We don’t get good strawberries the rest of the year!” So she couldn’t actually be mad.

I was always kind of a weird, quiet kid, and everyone else would go in and say hi to Grandma. I’d go out back, and sit in the pear tree and eat strawberries before I went in and said hi. I was the smallest one, and I knew that if I didn’t eat the fruit first, I wouldn’t get nearly as many as the big kids. So I’d go eat strawberries first, and then go say hi while everyone else was unpacking.

At the end of the summer, before we’d leave, was right when her grapes would start to get ripe. They were always just a little too sour. She didn’t grow very good grapes, but they were good enough to make wine. And that was kind of the funny thing- that was all she really grew them for. She would make wine, and distill it down into brandy, and that was all she really wanted it for. She would put it down in the cellar- bottles of grape brandy. So that’s why I had the grapes and the strawberries instead of the corn. And then it’s the nuts, so we’ve got acorns. And then the middle is kind of harvest in general. Squash and pumpkins.

Then there’s the hunting moon, so I’ve got the elk antlers and the bear head. I’m not much of a hunter— my dad and I are vegetarians. But I definitely respect the spirit, so I had to put some noble animals in there. And then the last one is the snowy moon, with the big snowflakes. I remember cutting out snowflakes in December and January with my grandmother, cutting them out of paper and sticking them up on all the windows.

It was a lot of fun memories. It was really fun sitting and drawing it all. And then it was really silly, because with linoleum cuts you have to do everything backwards, right? So I drew it all out, drew it on the linoleum, and I was doing great. Flipping it in my head, and kept printing it to test. I was doing great. And the one that I couldn’t figure out was the corn tassels. I left it for last, because I thought I would mess it up. And then, sure enough, that was the one that I just couldn’t quite translate for some reason. It’s a little wobbly. But you know what? They always look a little bizarre.

They do always look bizarre. And it makes sense, right? It’s a human invention!

Yeah, we did very strange things to grass to make it do that.

How does this relate to the rest of your work?

It’s actually one of the first black and white things I’ve done in a very long time. I normally work with a lot of color. But I have a brain tumor, and bright colors give me a headache. Which makes me very sad, because I love bright colors. My bedroom is orange. I’m wearing black right now, but the rest of my clothes are maroon and teal.

It’s very strange to me that I now have to tone everything down to black and white. To make up for that, I just tried to cram as much detail into it as I could. It was interesting, too, because my memories, even though many of them were winter memories, are very colorful. Thinking about my aunts and everyone, all the yarn was really bright yarn. I used to love to go and sit in my Grandmother’s closet, in her yarn box. I would just sit in the rolls of yarn, and it would smell like menthols. She would always tell us, “I hid some candy for you.” I’m sure she told every single of us this, but she would tell us specific spots in her room where she would hide candy. My spot was in the yarn box. She would put my favorite caramel and apple suckers in the yarn box, so the other kids wouldn’t get them. I was the youngest, and she looked out for me. I would go sit in the yarn box, and eat the caramel apple suckers and play with the yarn. Her cat would come and curl up with me.

That sounds like a great afternoon.

It was. It’s Southern Illinois, so it’s snowing outside. It smells like the bottom of a smoker’s shoe. The carpet was bright forest green shag. All of the quilts were piled on top of her bed, and I would sit and stare at all the different patterns. They were all made up of flour sacks and stuff, because her dad had been a veterinarian during the great depression. A lot of people would pay him with sacks of whatever they had, and his wife would turn them into quilts. So I’d sit and read all the different labels on the sides of the blankets. Rice, flour, and the calico prints. They were beautiful. But it was so bright. And outside it was totally white. These days, I may not be able to do anything but lay in bed sometimes in the dark, but in my head it’s still really bright.

Now that you’ve responded to a prompt by making a piece of art, do you have any advice for someone else who’s going to do the same thing?

I think just go with your gut. That’s what I did, and it felt really silly at first. But I just went with it. I decided to sketch it out, and know that I could justify it later. The more I worked on it, the more right it felt. And that was your advice too- it doesn’t have to be your magnum opus, just have fun.

Call Number: C43VA | C45VA.ryaRo

Anna Ryan is a folk artist passionate about telling stories and sharing the beauty nature in general and the Sonoran desert in particular through painting. She loves bright color, light, and collaborating with other artists—especially the ones in her family. She lives in Arizona, where she rummages through her father’s wood sculpting shop and steals his best scraps to paint, for which she’s very grateful.