Now, Ever Awake, My Master Dear, I Fear a Deadly Storm

Anne Ryan

In 1941, Anne Ryan made her first print at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 located in the New School for Social Research in New York. Four years later she explored the technique of color woodcut with Louis Schanker who invited her to join his Vanguard group of printmakers and her work was included in their exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1946.

Print scholar David Acton discussed Ryan's color woodcut on page 176 of "A Spectrum of Innovation - Color in American Printmaking, 1890-1969":

"Ryan worked in color woodcut between 1945 and 1949. From the beginning of her activity in the medium she simultaneously created representational pieces and pure abstractions...The color of her paper made the lines of Ryan's single-block woodcuts seem drawn, and her colors acheived a saturation and luminosity from those caused by white papers, the black ground read through the thin layers of ink, and an organic mottled texture was effectively acheived...."

In addition to her visual artistry, Ryan was a poet and author heavily involved in the literary circles of Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 30s. It's possible that she borrowed the title of this piece from poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's interpretation of the The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. An English ballad with roots in the 13th century, it tells of a maritime disaster predicted by the sailor Patrick Spens, who eventually goes down with the doomed ship.

Several iterations of this ballad have surfaced in popular culture throughout the centuries; Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode", remains among the most quoted. Written by the poet to a forbidden love, the interpreted stanza reads,"Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon / With old Moon in her arms; / And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! / We shall have a deadly storm."