Every time Tina and Joseph Drakulich go into their bathroom, they face a sprawling wall mural of a rock and roller who, if walls could talk, is engaged in perhaps one of the most heartfelt guitar solos of his life.

The last time Joseph checked his car owner’s manual, he found sketches of quirky characters and faces riddling the pages where oil change directions used to be.

Even when pulling out certain cereal boxes, Tina checks the back panels for oil pastel colorings, accustomed to finding skulls or messages written artfully on them.

“We find little pieces of him everywhere,” Tina said. “He couldn’t not draw. Art was so natural to him. It was like getting a glass of water. He just did it.”

Referring to their son, David, Tina and Joseph cling to his work, remembering his impulsive behavior.

“He lived dangerously,” Tina said. “He never thought about consequences. He was bold.”

So when David came home one afternoon with his signature grin asking his parents “Guess what I did?” it came as no surprise that their oldest son had signed up for the Army without consulting them first.

“He was a weird kid, incredibly unique,” Joseph said. “He just had this movement to him. His mind was bigger than his body.”

Bigger indeed. The 2003 Hug High graduate went on to study for a year at Truckee Meadows Community College, only to find that something wasn’t right for him there.

Soon after, David signed the papers and became a forward observer stationed in Afghanistan, appointed to head out before troops to scope out an area or town.

And while David died on Jan. 9, 2008 at the age of 22 when his vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device (IED) — only a few short months before he was scheduled to return — his memory and his art live on.

“I think he knew he was going to die,” Tina said, reflecting on some of the messages in David’s work. “But being the artist he was, he had to get the same experiences that make a great artist.”

David’s work is prolific, enough to rank him with some of art’s greats. From the age of 5 years old, David was already drawing sketches that his father describes as resembling that of Renoir. In school, David became accustomed to bringing in artwork to help express what he had written in an English paper.

“Drawing and writing became united in his mind,” Tina said.

By the age of 13, David was hungry for art, Tina said. If any workable blank surface was left out, like a cereal box, it became David’s canvas.

“He would use anything most of the time,” Tina said with a laugh, recalling a time when she found her son had written his name over and over on a garage wall. “He was very quirky.”

And after much mentoring with a local artist, Lynda Yuroff, David and his art took off, producing more than 100 finished paintings and more than 300 other pieces, including sketches and drawings, between the ages of 13 and 17.

“He had been a prodigy all along,” Tina said.

“It’s class-A art,” Joseph added. “My son did that for me.”

Most works, which included abstract undertones of mountains, cityscapes, human figures and quite a bit of death, lent themselves well to David’s approach of layering, as he hardly ever limited himself to just one medium.

Tina, an art teacher herself, and Joseph both encouraged David’s ingenuity as the teenager reached for newspapers, oil sticks, acrylic paints — anything with which he could create art.

While overseas, David’s momentum for art didn’t slow down. He kept many journals with poetry and sketches, signifying his respect for the very thing he was helping fight for — freedom.

“(In America) David knew no one would ever censor his work,” Tina said. “And after realizing he had so much to express, that was a bottom line for him.”

Joseph, who often received phone calls from his son during his off duty, recalled his son’s free-loving spirit, remembering one time David joked about marrying a 6-foot 5-inch Afghani woman or when he openly snacked on other people’s food once they left a restaurant, earning him the nickname “Little Bear.”

“Everywhere he went, everyone was touched by these extraordinary experiences,” Joseph said. “He was always getting into something. I’m sure people asked him ‘What did you do this time, Drakulich?’ "

And while both Tina and Joseph know they will never again see their son’s signature mischevious grin, one look at any of his works brings a wave of appreciation for a young man who looked at and treated the world differently.

“There are different ways to communicate and to think,” Tina said, a message she hopes viewers take away from her son’s work. “He was an adrenaline junkie, with a creative twist to it.”

To see some of David’s work, Tina and Joseph have put together a collection entitled “Internal Forces,” which is on display from Feb. 9 through April 12 at Reno’s Metro Gallery located at 1 E. First St. in Reno City Hall.