Come Say Goodbye

The series was called Come Say Goodbye when I was face timing with a friend who was preoccupied with something else, and I had to get off the call so I said, “Come Say Goodbye.” I immediately knew that that was a good name for the series. The name became more poignant to me on a personal level when my grandpa died in April and I took a trip from my home near Reno to Los Angeles to go to his funeral. During that time I was reading the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. Although I’m not a very religious person, this text has some very important things to say about death and the the present moment. We are here for a short time, suffering is abundant, time and chance happen to everyone. I felt I could map some of its messages into the series of paintings that I had just spent a long time on. They are all very colorful but there are dark things lurking in them: A central theme of Ecclesiastes is that you should enjoy whatever ounce of joy that you can find in this life, despite the hard fact that dark things are to come. there is darkness and monsters coming for all of us, so we may as well paint them with the most beautiful colors we can find.