Amy Hess said that her son, Henry, was born with a crayon in his hand.
A new retrospective show highlighting the decade Henry Hess has spent as an artist in Franklinton is testament to this reality. The exhibit documents not just the work he has displayed in galleries such as the Vanderelli Room and Lindsay Gallery beginning at age 14, but also assorted notebooks accumulated from childhood and filled with early versions of the characters that now fill crates, line walls and spill off a large drafting table in his spacious Chromedge studio.
“And this is just a fraction of what’s at our house,” said Amy, who joined husband Tom for an early October interview with Henry that moved between his Franklinton studio and nearby Project Unicorn, where the artist’s new retrospective, dubbed “Does Not Meet Expectations: Never Live Life by a Rubric,” will open on Friday, Oct. 13. (The title “Does Not Meet Expectations” is a reference to a grade Henry received from an art teacher on his middle school report card – a mark that coincided with his trek to the Outsider Art Fair in New York City, where he exhibited some of his work.)
Born with autism, Henry has never been able to fully verbalize how he views his surroundings, but his art has offered his parents at least some window into how his mind works. “It doesn’t give us so much insight into how he sees the world, but more that he sees it differently,” Tom said. “When I look at what he creates, it’s still magic to me. I don’t know how he can look at something three-dimensional and draw the schematic without any training or support. I don’t see how he does that, but I see that it’s different, and it’s something that I don’t see when I look at things.”
This natural sense of perspective exhibited itself in early character drawings – a number of which were pulled from classic movies such as “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” “Singing in the Rain” and “The Wizard of Oz” – where Henry would draw the people from the front and then flip the paper over and draw them from the rear. Later, this evolved into the artist sketching out automobiles, trains and increasingly elaborate houses on sheets of paper, then cutting them out and folding them into three-dimensional sculptures.
“He made this boat, and I don’t know where it is now, but it was huge, and it had the masts and it had the flags,” Amy said of the sculpture, which Henry built using tape and myriad sheets of white notebook paper. “And he carried it everywhere we went. And, Walter Herrmann, I’ll never forget, he came running up behind us and was like, ‘I need to meet your kid.’ I was like, ‘Okay. You’re an adult man and you want to meet my son. This is a little strange.’ And he goes, ‘No. Your kid’s a sculptor and I’m going to tell you why.’ And he sat down and gave us a full tutorial on how Henry sees things, and how unique it is that he can build things like that.”
Now 24, Henry has grown up within Franklinton’s community of artists, with creators such as Herrmann and AJ Vanderelli serving as mentors, colleagues and friends. Indeed, were it not for a chance decision 10 years ago and the subsequent input of people such as Vanderelli, it’s unsure what path Henry might have taken in his life.
As Tom recalled it, a decade ago the two had a decision to make about how to spend some summer funds set aside for Henry, and whether they should put it toward a membership at a swimming pool or three months of rent for an artist studio at a then nascent 400 West Rich.
“And we rented the studio for June, July and August,” Amy said. “And in those three months we met Alicia (AJ) Vanderelli and all of these other people who were like, ‘This kid is incredibly talented. You’ve got to keep him down here.’ And so, we stayed. And we never left.”
Amy said the artists in Franklinton called attention to Henry’s unique abilities – the natural sense of symmetry displayed in his drawings and sculptures, the way he can complete a character with a single, committed line (hence the name of his artist LLC, Committed Lines), and how rare it is for him to erase something or go back and make a correction. And, while it took some effort, this same community of artists gradually convinced Amy and Tom that their son wasn’t just churning out childhood doodles, but rather developing into an artist with his own unique voice and style, and who was amassing an increasingly impressive portfolio of work.
“We had no frame of reference for what an artist was,” said Amy, who recalled getting into early heated discussions on the subject with Vanderelli. “It took some convincing. … But when Henry went back for seventh grade, Alicia was like, ‘He doesn’t need to be in school five days,’ and we agreed. So, we worked it out with the principal, and we would pick him up every Friday and bring him down here, and he had adventures that we will probably never know about.”
While Henry’s style has evolved and his technique has steadily improved, he continues to revisit some of the same characters and subjects that he has gravitated toward from the beginning, including actors culled from classic movies and similarly larger-than-life personas such as Nina West, who Amy said her son was drawn to owning to her elaborate costumes and room-filling persona. Henry also continues to work at the same break-neck speed with which he first started filling out the sketch pads that Amy stockpiled by the dozens.
“There are so many of these and they come out so fast and furious,” Amy said. “I think it's a cathartic process, and it's something he has to get out.”
The retrospective is structured in such a way that visitors can trace a path through Henry’s entire life as an artist, from his earliest boyhood stick figures to more recent paintings of people such as Nina West, ending at a drawing of a house in Franklinton, which beginning next spring will serve as Henry’s primary residence.
“You’ll see this whole timeline and all of the stuff he’s done, and now the new residence where Henry will be a Franklinton resident,” said Amy, who along with Tom purchased and renovated the home. “There’s a lot of work ahead of us, but he’s got such a community of people around him that we’re okay. … It just feels like the universe is saying this is the next step for him.”
