This week my days off, I’ve been waking up between 2 and 4 am. Not so unusual for me, since I work night shift and my body clock is completely reversed. In these wee hours, given how cold and quiet it is, I often find myself want to do quiet but active things. Reading doesn’t quite do it for me. But making art does! In the last few days, I’ve been making these…
Mixed media, a classic form including the collage (which I’ve been calling the fancy name decoupage I just realized), has always been a favorite of mine. I often like to incorporate paintings into mine as well, so a whole canvas might be combined with small objects such as plants or screws or beads or fabric or basically anything that inspires you. There is almost always paper involved as well, whether it be cut up magazines or (gasp! books) or other paintings, etcetera. One of my recent decoupages has an acrylic painting topped with watercolor paintings, handwritten song lyrics, and magazine parts. Pretty typical for me.
That one, which I’m calling Blackbird (for obvious reasons) also demonstrates how inspiration and process come together. I started this morning with several old watercolors–mismatched & different sized flowers, and a red-winged blackbird. My table was also covered with snippets of magazines from a few days of culling. I grabbed a canvas & first decided to work dry, finding my pieces and layout before gluing anything down.
The blackbird was first to roost, taking center stage on a canvas that I chose specifically to highlight his placement. Next, I laid down some flowers, unsure if I would use them all (I didn’t) or where. Then, I had an aha! One of my favorite songs is Blackbird by the Beatles (or any of many other cover versions that has been made). So obviously I had to listen to it.
And here is where the materials I started the project with (a blackbird painting) led to a moment of inspiration (the song) that led to a cascade of moment-memories, thinking about the times when I’ve listened to Blackbird before, what it’s meant to me, and so on.
Did you realize that you can just type “Blackbird cover” into Amazon music, and you’ll get pages of different versions of the song?
Of the many times I’ve listened to this song on repeat, most have been in dark times in my life. Times when I’ve been lonely &/or alone; times when I felt like a small blackbird in the night with broken wings, unable to escape the night. Just darkness in & around me.
But in the past month, my light has returned more powerfully than ever. And this song is so different now. Hearing it now makes me realize that despite the broken wing, the blackbird can still fly. It is a different and hopeful place that I really want to share with you.
And so I dove into my cut up magazines, finding phrases like “giving thanks” and “incurable optimist” but maybe my favorite is just a snippet of a thought–but it is a snippet that I want to define my next year with:
humans at
our most ambitious, our most inquisitive, our most engaged,
our most eternal, our most creative
–“Blackbird” mixed media by Heather Brossard (
post-script: the title of this post is stolen from the title of a Mary Oliver book & poem. Did you know that you cannot like copyright a title? Well, that’s what they told me in grad school anyways. Here is a link to the poem “Why I Wake Early” in GoodReads; it is delightful if you would like to read it.