Artwork Details

In a dream, I went to California to get the bones of my brother. Ever the optimist, I began to paint about picking up bones like flowers hoping it would make sense to me later. When my brother died from ALS in San Jose, California, 18 years later, the dream became real. His decline was long and slow, so I got to visit him every month, but it hit me when I became the steward of his remains. Now I dream about him riding his Harley through the Santa Cruz mountains (when they aren’t on fire) and make paintings of conversations we never had.

If this piece had a soundtrack it would be Say Hello To Heaven by Temple of The Dog:

“Please, mother mercy
Take me from this place
And the long-winded curses
I hear in my head
The words never listen
And teachers, oh they never learn
My warmth from the candle
Though I feel too cold to burn

Artist Bio

David Eugene Lemley’s love of Spanish masters from Picasso to Goya and Velazquez is, curiously, non-evident in much of his work. He does have an impressive bookshelf or two that feeds this Spanish-hearted lust. In addition to several oversized art books, it is peppered with “degenerate” novels and religious texts – which do inhabit his work.

Critics (and his mom) once said that his paint handling invokes memories of the linework in DeKooning portraiture and Basquiat’s Neo-expressionist street art, while feeling new, celebratory, and plain-spoken all at once. While Lemley enthusiastically accepts that assessment, he finds it odd because he has been telling people that he wants to be the next Picasso since was seven years old.

Today, he lives in Seattle, Washington in a skinny house on a skinny street. Along with family, Lemley enjoys city-living so he can walk for coffee and wear ironic rock music t-shirts to cultural events. Living in his skinny house allows him to keep one eye on Mount Rainier and the other on The Space Needle. The weirdest part is that his family insisted on getting a 70-pound Golden-doodle, who, despite his best efforts, thinks he is the cat’s meow.