NARRATOR:  

Artist Sono Osato, a close friend of the late artist, remembers Dashiell: 

SONO OSATO:  

I met David in 1987 – I think he was a few years out of Cal-Arts. He had an incisive intelligence that really penetrated the facade of society. And a great sense of humor. And his work has always had a resonance to me in terms of how he combines elements. He used Christian myths, he used the Tarot, all these different aspects of signage or fortune-telling or map making- but reused these myths with his discourse about being gay in our culture.  

The process of the mural was done in a lot of ways like cell painting in animation. It was painted from the back. So it’s like painting a picture on the inside of a television. So you have to go from the specific to the general, you go from the foreground colors to the background colors. What that does is it creates a flawless surface, a surface that looks like it was not painted. His process was extremely meticulous.  

Queer Mysteries was his masterpiece. There was a huge urgency on his part when he knew that he was really sick to say it all before he died. In many ways David reenacted a very old studio arrangement of having the great master having a person underneath that worked very closely with that person and then assistants that put it together. There was no other way that that would ever have been accomplished. And it’s amazing that he pulled it together right before he died.