BRIAN HONYOUTI

Brian Honyouti was born to Clyde and Rachel Honyouti on February 3, 1947. He has one older sister and four younger brothers. He lives in Hotevilla with his wife, Rethema, and their two younger daughters.

Brian is a man who has never taken the easy path; He is determined to follow his own convictions in his calling as an artist. He started carving kachina dolls in the mid 1960's after graduating from high school. He helped his father paint his dolls and so picked up basic carving skills. In the late 1960's his father, who made his dolls no larger than six to eight inches tall at that time, began to carve his dolls out of one piece of wood. Brian believes that his father was the first carver in Hotavilla to do so, because everyone else was still gluing on arms and legs, as well as other decorative attributes, onto tithu and decorating them with real feathers.

In 1968 Brian moved to Tucson to attend the University of Arizona where he received a bachelor's degree in anthropology. From 1968 to 1971 he held a student part time job at the Arizona State Museum, working with Earnest E. Leavitt, who at the time was curator of exhibits. The museum now has one of Brian's early kachina dolls in its collections.

After Brian's return to Bacavi, he started to experiment with wood preservers and varnishes. He is universally credited with being the first kachina-doll carver to use these as a wood sealer instead of the white undercoat for paint. He tried out all kinds of wood preservers, oil-based varnishes, and linseed oil, mixing them together to produce the varnish he liked best. He would use these on his own and his father's dolls. Brian was also the first carver to substitute wood preserver for paint, leaving areas of flesh tone, buckskin, and cotton unpainted, simply treating them with wood preserver. At that time he was still painting with acrylic paints, but in 1978 he settled on oil paints. Initially, recentful dealers and collectors did not want to buy his dolls, but Bruce McGee provided an outlet for their sale. Ron Honyouti liked his brother's innovation and has since used oil paints himself.

Brian does not dillute his colors as much as Ron does, so his dolls have a bit more color intensity, but because the colors are used only in certain areas, they look muted.Since the electricity from his house comes from a generator, he rarely uses a Dremel tool. The carving tools he uses are pocketknives of various sizes, chisels, a hacksaw blade, and small files. He uses sandpaper for polishing, and emery board to reach into narrow places. In earlier years he used rasps for smoothing the carved wood, but now he only uses sandpaper.

Brian carves kachina dolls, clowns, kachina sculptures, and portraits of Hopi people - a great variety of subject matter within and realated to Hopi religious life. His wood carvings are very realistic, and most of them are slightly larger than Ron's. Until 1990 most of Brian's energy and time was directed to his Bacavi School, where he was both teacher and principal, so he could only devote the evening hours to his art. Now, however, the school has closed, and he devotes all his time to carving.