The Frank family’s art will be featured at Catholic Art Festival
Where some people see ordinary objects, the Frank children see art.
For the past six years, they’ve been honing their creative skills — and eye for beauty — alongside their parents, Will and Jane, through the family’s art project: Drawn Small.
The family’s work will be featured with close to 30 other local artists at the third annual Catholic Art Festival on Sept. 14. The festival, established in 2022 to celebrate the gift of creativity in the local Church, includes visual artists, live performances and children’s activities on the Epiphany of Our Lord Parish field.
Drawn Small grew out of Will Frank’s enthusiasm for sharing his love of art with his seven children, who now range in age from 14 years to 18 months. Will worked for nearly two decades as a designer with Emil Frei &Associates Inc., a liturgical design studio specializing in stained glass and mosaics, before founding Studio Totus in 2023 with business partner John Wheadon. As experts in liturgical art and architecture, their projects include the new chapel at St. Louis University High School and an ongoing chapel project with Catholic Cemeteries, among others.
Before starting the family art project, Will enjoyed his work at Emil Frei but was looking for another creative outlet.
“I didn’t have the bandwidth at that time to start my own studio practice and start exhibiting large exhibitions, and try to get representation in a gallery,” he said. “I wanted something that made sense for Jane and my life, and our kids’ life. So it just made sense to kind of look around us: What’s immediate? What can we do?”
One of their first endeavors was inspired by a collection of chicken feathers piling up in then-4-year-old Peter’s bedroom. Throughout his art education, Will had been drawn to printmaking, so he decided to use the feathers to teach his children soft-ground etching.
“This was a way of capturing this moment in our lives of these chickens and this idea of this collection,” he said. “I was able to work with the kids to show them the various steps, and they could do at least some of the steps (themselves). And then we’re left with this beautiful print. And then we can move on, and then there’s something else.”
Now, the Frank children move with easy familiarity around the basement studio, expertly dividing and conquering the steps of printmaking. As they prepared prints for the Catholic Art Festival, Ruth, 14, spread ink into an even, thin layer across a pane of glass. “You don’t want thick sections and thin sections,” she said as she ran a roller brush through it, then rolled the ink carefully over a linocut with an image of an angel.
Clement, 12, moistened a piece of paper with a spray bottle “to help the ink soak into the paper more quickly,” he explained.
They carried the linocut and paper over to the etching press and laid them down on top of long pieces of felt and paper, then flipped more paper and felt down to cover them. Joseph, 8, turned the press’s manual crank, pulling the materials through the press.
“This is the moment we all love,” Jane said, as they all gathered around. “It’s the magic,” Will added. Clement unveiled the paper, picking it up to reveal the image of the angel, cleanly printed on the paper.
Some of the family’s artwork is explicitly religious, including woodcut prints of the Madonna and Child, St. Joseph and the child Jesus, and St. Francis of Assisi.
Other series focus on natural objects found in their everyday lives. After the chicken feathers, they created a collection of soft-ground etching prints of leaves they collected from nature walks. Cicada shells became the subject of a cyanotype project, an early photographic method that involves applying a light-sensitive solution to paper and exposing it to sunlight to become a fixed image.
“To me, it is religious in that sense of the wonder of creation, being attentive to it in a different way,” Will said. “Like these leaf prints we did. How many hundreds of times have I walked on a sidewalk and crunched the leaves? To collect those and make a print, they’re being attentive to that thing on a different level.”
“For me personally, and I hope for my kids, it offers a different level of reflection or attentiveness to people but really the world around you in creation,” he continued. “Honestly, it’s just a beautiful activity. You’re creating something, and whether or not you’re thinking about it that literally, you are participating in this idea of creation. And that’s a divine thing.”
They don’t have many family photos around the home — with seven kids, it’s hard to get everyone to stand still in the same place long enough, Will said with a laugh — so instead, they created a nine-square collection of printed portraits of each family member. The older kids helped carve wooden block reliefs of each person, then printed them in various colors.
The regular practice of noticing beauty is a natural way to keep their family culture centered on God, Jane said.
“Something we say all the time is, ‘Everything good comes from God.’ Because that’s true,” she said. “So part of this is marveling at all these good things around us, which we’re maybe more attentive to when we’re trying to draw it or print it — just wow, here’s something else that’s beautiful from God. We’re surrounded by all these gifts.”
As the children have grown older, they’ve started to take on more responsibility and develop their own artistic interests. Ruth recently served as an assistant to her father on a Stations of the Cross project for SSM Health St. Louis University Hospital. “I really enjoyed those because the paper we printed them on was like medical pictures from the hospital,” she said. “We did them in all assorted colors.”
The peace that comes while creating art has drawn her closer to God, she said. Now a freshman at Chesterton Academy of St. Louis, Ruth participated in an icon project with her classmates at The St. Austin School last year. The teacher who led the project gave her some leftover materials, which she used to create her own icon at home. “It’s really peaceful — there’s all these layers,” she said. “And the process was just relaxing. It was a really powerful experience.”
The children are also part of exhibiting the artwork in various capacities, including talking to people at local festivals. Right now, some of their prints of leaves, feathers and roots are on display in Terminal 2 (Gate 33) of the St. Louis Lambert International Airport.
But the best part? Art is something they do together, Clement said. “I just really enjoy in the night when we’re all down here working on things,” he said.
Catholic Art Festival
What: Third annual Catholic Art Festival
When: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 14
Where: Epiphany of Our Lord Parish field, 6593 Smiley Ave. in St. Louis
For more information, visit catholicartfest.com.
