Kate Breakey is an artist who lived in Austin for a while. I woke up today thinking about her.

She made dead things soar.

She took photos of dead animals and flowers--sometimes roadkill. Mostly, it was birds. From those photos, she made large black and white prints over which she layered transparent oils.

You might think, what a macabre process. The intimate examination of death. But then you look at her paintings, the colors like fires, lit-up blues, rose-golds, umbers. You might believe there is more life in the dead, in the grieving, than there is in the living. You look at her paintings--a beautiful fist to the gut.

I heard her speak at the Texas Book Festival in 2001. She attracted a crowd.

She showed slides. Some from her childhood--was it in Australia? Some poverty or darkness in her childhood I no longer remember.

I do remember her as a beautiful woman in disarray. Blonde hair rather matted. Her humor fragile. Her eyes darting. Her voice trembled, but her passion was formidable.

As she spoke, we looked at her tremendous paintings, her dead things with their vibrant auras. I had a sharp insight about what drove her work. Others were asking about technique, or where she had lived. I had an observation that seemed to me would get to the heart of everything.

You paint over and over again, as though if you paint enough of these, you will finally...

I didn’t say whatever it was I was going to say. I saw her, repeating again and again this process--the lighting, the photos, the prints, the painting and painting and painting, not covering over the dead, but illuminating them. Who was I to try to reduce her process to clumsy words?

We can’t do the work of others, no matter how much grief we would like to save them. No one can do our work for us. Part of what illuminates our living is the grief. We too make dead birds soar.