by Julie Mackaman
A House Full of Color
Anna Moriarty Lev grew up in houses full of color. I remember the walls in the Bennington house in Chester Knoll where her family lived after moving from Colorado to Vermont: a riot of different hues bouncing off each other and exuberant, eclectic art hung on the walls and thumbtacked on doors. Anna says that this house, like all their previous homes, had an art room dedicated to projects. “I never thought about art as something you did or didn’t do,” she remembers. “It was everywhere.”
While her mother Viola and younger sister Phoebe were her companions in the art room, it was her father Jon who brought home that first comic book — Archie — from a trip to the grocery store. Anna, then a 7-year-old girl mesmerized by Archie and Jughead’s exploits, read the comic book, cover to cover, over and over. Her compass was set: from now on she would not only write and draw the stories she made up, but turn them into comics.
In high school at Mount Anthony, inspired by her theater teachers Tim Foley and Daryl Kenny, Anna prepared for college with the dream of becoming an actor/director/playwright. Meanwhile her mother, then in her 40s, took up painting and soon launched her career as a professional artist. The mother and daughter were embarking on their “adult art careers” at the same time.
A Self-taught Artist Figures Something Out
Anna enrolled at The New School in New York City, where she studied playwriting, creative writing, literature, dance and poetry, along with such liberal arts courses as ethics, politics and sociology. But drawing was never far outside the frame: in subways or at the beach she would pull out her sketchpad and pencils, felt-tip pens or watercolors to record what she saw. As she rediscovered her love for drawing comics, she began to think that art — yes, comics! — could be turned into a real job.
Check Anna’s Work Out Online
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- For an excerpt from the cancer comic book, Adventure of a Left Breast, published on Spiralbound in 2018 as Our Sacred Little World of Dying: http://medium.com/spiralbound/our-sacred-little-world-of-dying-d60afb40311b
- For other of Anna’s comics published on Spiralbound, a comics, art, and illustration section on Medium: https://medium.com/@annamolev
- Follow Anna on Instagram: @levhardware
- Or on her blog: levhardware.wordpress.com
After she moved back up to Vermont, she eked out a living as the projectionist for Images Cinema in Williamstown. At home, working side by side on tabletops and easels, Anna and her mother sometimes produced art collaboratively, with Anna continuing to draw — despite Viola’s encouragement to give painting a try.
Cartoonist Anna Moriarty Lev (left) often collaborated with her mother and AAUW member, the late artist Viola Moriarty
It wasn’t until four years after Viola’s death that serendipity opened a door. In 2017 her mother-in-law, Diane Howard, gave Anna some of her late father’s old acrylic paints and canvases. After her first foray into painting, excited about her discovery, she called her sister Phoebe. “Isn’t it great,” responded Phoebe, “moving color around?”
Anna’s paintings, like the house she where she grew up, are full of color.
Today, Anna — who identifies as a cartoonist and painter — is glad for the artistic freedom that being a self-taught artist gives her. And she is glad that, to her wonderment, art is now her job. She exhibits her work, leads workshops, sells her paintings and notecards, publishes her comics and short stories, and most recently, produces a line of hand-painted clothes.
But Here’s the Thing About Her Comics…
With the above as an introduction to the artist, the thing that strikes me about Anna’s comics is that they are so personal, gentle, and fearless in their unblinking curiosity about the things that give life meaning. A private person, Anna has created a female character in her comics who stands in for her and who can process — for herself and for her readers — encounters with the uplifting joys and crushing pains of living.
Need an example? In the comic book co-created by Anna and her mother Viola, Adventures of a Left Breast, the first half comprises comics drawn by Viola, about her cancer diagnosis and treatments, and the second half, comics drawn by Anna, about the cancer’s recurrence and Viola’s death. Each frame is a lesson in honesty in the face of unbearable grief, but the love that illuminates them is one of the best arguments I’ve seen for putting one foot in front of the other.
“Does it hurt to die?” A page drawn by Anna toward the end of the cancer comic book, Adventures of a Left Breast, excerpted by Spiralbound as Our Sacred Little World of Dying.
A Cartoonist Addresses Diversity and Inclusivity
I asked Anna for a few words about our AAUW theme of diversity and inclusivity, with its counter-currents of implicit bias, bigotry, and discrimination. She told me that she thinks a lot about privilege and prejudice, especially as a white woman living in a mostly white community, and raising two sons — while wondering “how much space I should take up?” in her work when so many underrepresented voices need to be heard.
As she considers how to raise her boys into “anti-racist” manhood, she talks with her son Giles, 4, who’s now old enough to help her paint signs and join her at vigils and demonstrations. She finds that his curiosity and questions are showing her the way. It is no surprise, then, that Anna’s inaugural comic for our series relates a conversation with Giles.