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289 c h a p t e r 1 5  Relearning for Life henry frank (yurok) It seems remarkable, given the circumstances, that Henry Frank is thriving as an artist. Is it the power of art or is it the power of Henry? As he held up his woodcuts, Henry, generally a modest man, all but beamed. A self-portrait titled Big Bear Medicine features the top half of Henry’s Buddha-like torso, his hands clasped lightly, his expression serene behind glasses. Emanating from his wide head and long hair are myriad strands, possibly of hair, possibly of light. Henry’s face and arms (“the color of copper,” he wrote in an essay for a college class) are white like the paper, the rest mostly dark. A sheet of other woodcuts—really linoleum cuts, he explained—is titled Klamath Inhabitants and includes a cabin, a Japanese-style riverscape, a bear grasping a birch tree. Henry signed both pieces “Hawk,” the translation of the Yurok name his grandmother gave him in childhood. A year later, he was working on smaller woodcuts, of a hawk, wolf, otter, deer, each containing geometrical imagery he hoped was Yurok. He was planning to arrange them as one larger piece, with a spider in the center. “It’s going to be called Web of Life.” Another woodcut portrayed his mother’s aunt, whose existence he learned about shortly after she died. Henry was painting, too, mostly animals with iridescent touches. “I’m a huge Liquitex fan.” He had framed the paintings with branches. He was also learning to make hand drums. Several hung on a wall. One was for his father. “‘I want it square and I want it eighteen by eighteen.’ I had to compromise because the skin isn’t that big of a deer, so I made it fifteen by fifteen. I was CH015.qxd 12/14/10 8:24 AM Page 289 like, ‘Tell me how to make it traditionally.’ He’s like, ‘You’re Yurok, so whatever you make is going to be all right. Just make it square.’” His father also wanted it painted, which was fine with Henry—paint makes the skin tauter. “Then he wanted abalone inlay. Well, if I have the abalone and learn how to inlay, which probably is just a Dremel [power tool] or a router, I could probably do all that, but I didn’t think there was going to be that much space in here [the studio where he works].” Henry ultimately nixed the abalone. The rest of the drum was coming along, with some elements arriving from a mail order trading post. “I’ll probably have a bear claw hanging off this.” He gestured to the strap. “I’ll have four eagle feathers on this side and four red tail hawks on this side. I’ll have a grizzly bear pattern and maybe a little frog, because in our culture it’s good luck.” Henry seemed elated to oblige his father’s request. “He said he’s going to play it all the time. He’ll take it all around the rez [the Yurok Reservation] and play songs.” Ever since he was “a little guy,” as Henry put it, his father encouraged Henry’s artistic talents. “I’m going to share a story.” (Reader beware: it is disgusting .) “I’d seen my dad draw all the time, and he would make leatherwork, he would make regalia, arrows, and quivers. One day he was out at school, and I was there with his girlfriend, my brother and I. I used the restroom. And I reached in after I was done, grabbing out the stool, and I rubbed it all over the wall. But not just any way. I shaped and everything. She was hot. ‘Wait till your father comes! You can’t be doing that.’ As soon as Dad walks in the door, ‘You got to go see what your son did.’ She’s screaming, and she walks him back there. ‘Here! This is what he did!’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, my God. We have an artist!’ So I get that, and he pulls me aside, says, ‘We got to wash this off. There are more appropriate ways to express yourself artistically.’ “That’s when I got the coloring book and crayons, and then it goes into pencil and pen and paper and then carvings and then on the beach with the mud. When I was about thirteen, I started drawing my...

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