We've been best friends since elementary school always seeking adventures, sometimes even unpleasant ones just to see if we could joke our way through them. We did hard labor on the railroad, played in a rock and roll band in the '60s, and rode motorcycles, to name a few. Laughter had added magic to everything for us....but we choked on our laughter when his wife died in his arms.
Goodbye I is a photograph of my living room rug. The original colors of the rug are lost with the use of black and white film, and this combined with sepia toner give the foreground a sand-like quality. I chopped some large tropical foliage from my yard and placed them on the rug, and hidden in the shadows of the leaves is a Mayan head with goodbye in Braille streaming from one eye. Two small turtles walk slowly across the "landscape".
Goodbye II was created while I contemplated love, the near loss of love, and the emptiness of losing one's love. I placed the same Mayan head that I used in Goodbye I into some sand which I imprinted with my hands and fingers. On the Mexican machete blade I had etched in Zapotec dialect a vow of love to my wife who almost died of typhoid fever in that region of Mexico prior to my friend's terrible loss.
Adulthood was forced upon us with the death of my friend's wife, even though we had been resisting for forty years. In Angels Die Hard II I feel like I'm saying goodbye to my carefree youth. Similar in composition and style of some old Mexican religious paintings, my old decaying leather motorcycle jacket seems to be ascending upon a palm leaf.