the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

Tales from the Other Side of Language 47
skill is awesome. Whatever can he be thinking? Over and over I look. I don’t
find anything remotely like my work.
Sheepish, I say to him, “I can’t find what you mean.”
He shows me a corner of a painting, simple, messy rocks lying in a
stream.
I am so touched, I stop my flirtation with fragile and delicate, the
incandescent light of a fragile peach, the delicacy of a bunch of leeks, or the
pattern of pink and yellow tulips blended across the page.
I begin to embrace bold and move toward messy. Working with less
order and more abandon is hard to do, and it takes me a long time. Meanwhile
the pieces of paper I work on get bigger and bigger. The flowers get larger,
more voluptuous, and less tied to the specifics of the flower. Now they are
flowers in my mind without a vase.
It is here I begin to follow the thread of my own seeing. It isn’t a conscious
intellectual seeing. It emerges out of my body. Henry is a canny mentor in
this. He sits by me and shows me what my mind’s eye is looking at, presses
me beyond.
The painting has become more than speech therapy.
One afternoon I’m so exhausted I can’t drag my body out the door to
class. But I must paint! In my small galley kitchen looking out over silvered
rooftops below, I jerry-rig a place to work. The half-elephant size paper
is beautiful, heavy and coarse to the touch. The first gesture, a setting for
everything else, is clumsy and artless. I scrub it out and create more mess.
The paper is expensive, but I begin again with a new piece. I have a vision
of swirling patterns, poinsettia leaves with their tiny, orangey flowerets in the
center. I paint the veins of the leaves in wide gestures of blue-reds, orangeyreds,
purples, splotches of white paper showing through. With a carbon pencil
I harshly trace the swirls of leaves now flowing around the coarse paper. It is
the vision I had, but wilder and rougher in the actuality. The next day I put
in a dense vegetative background of browns, greens, and black to complete
the painting. The background is a new experiment, and it works.