Born in 1978 in Santa Clara, California, Lemon left high school in Sacramento when he was 17 and headed for Santa Cruz, where he worked as an insulation technician and foreman until he enrolled in San Francisco's Culinary Academy at 20 years of age. Cooking led to his interest in art. After ample experimentation, he finally fell for wood-block prints because, as he explains over a magnificent meal he cooked for a dozen friends, "I wanted to be able to talk about ideas and communicate with people, and be accepted as a family member. I aimed to do this by offering prints as gifts to all the people I admired and anyone else interested in art." Now living in Brooklyn. Lemon ruminates on it all. "I feel like a beautiful dog chasing its delicious tail only to bite it off once I get hold of it, and then repeating the process after it grows back."