the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

70 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance:
promotion in 1905 to head carpenter in a major building firm in town. The
following year he built his own house, his way, out in a meadow, edging on
a long ravine of woods out of town.
I like this picture of the man making his own way; I sense his enthusiasm
poured into the walls and floors of this house. I realize that I, too, am a new
person in this house. I’m like a lizard who’s lost a foot and grown another. I
lost speech and grew feelers waving in the air.
In the center of the studio I construct a large table from two outsized
doors, place them on sawhorses. More space makes it possible for me to
work larger. I love rough, heavy, thick paper, but the double elephant paper
I’m thinking about is expensive and too large to store easily. I buy pieces of
canvas and try using it like the coarse watercolor paper, wetting it as I would
paper. I paint with rags, not brushes, spreading and smearing color into the
wet, selectively taking up some of the color with towels as it begins to dry,
rewetting, and taking up color again. This works.
A local tent and awning company carries art-quality canvas, cheaply,
and I buy a whole roll of it. I rip six-by-five-foot pieces, don’t stretch them,
and then hang what I like with tent grommets.
I expand the painting surface dramatically, and with it the passion. I
paint from the scathing fatigue always in my body, letting it flow through
my arms and fingers into the rags. Fatigue courses along through the paint
and across the rough fabric and becomes passion to the eye. I start a piece
with a germinal idea, and it moves on its own across the canvas. My hands
follow the fatigue from my body into the form.