Her "childhood sweetheart" Wilbur Henry "reluctantly" agreed to marry her and accompany her to Iowa, where he completed a master's degree in entomology while she taught.

[2] During World War II, back in California while her husband served in the military,[3] Henry studied lithography at San Francisco School of Fine Arts[4] and worked drafting engineering drawings at Hewlett-Packard;[5] this drafting experience would later allow her to draw uncommonly straight lines freehand in executing her paintings.

This led to her studying with him at the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1945, leaving her daughter Suzanne in California with Henry's mother.

Matthew Kangas writes, "It was as if, after 20 years of fulfilling conventional expectations as a wife, worker, and mother, she was released into a constant stream of creative production, capturing the exuberant hedonism of Northern California, while reined in by the consummate formal control she had assimilated as an American Constructivist in Chicago."

Also in 1976, at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington, she attended a master painter's class with Jack Tworkov, then in his seventies.