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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.
48 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: I paint from the terrible damage to my brain. The intensity of fatigue flows through arms and hands, becomes passion on the paper. I paint strongly into rest, into the joy of being alive, into the urgency to speak, to see patients anyway. Death slammed my brain, marking its presence there, and thrust me into life. I have crossed a border. I have become a painter. Over time I become boldly gestural, no brushes, just rags. I discover black as an actual color, not negative, not a depressive allusion. Black is vibrant and fertile; my death lives there, holding the whole composition together, and the risky, vibrant, passionate reds circle its center. Red tulips travel up the paper in angled lines surrounded by soft yellow and white blossoms, the paper wetted to soften edges, at once creating bold and ethereal.
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We must be willing to give up the l
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Weeds, ink dr
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house as sentient. Tales from the O
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is now. Tales from the Other Side o
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lives around him in deep and import
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