David Lynch dreamt up some of the most twitchy, stay-with-you images in the history of film and television — Willem Dafoe’s tiny teeth in Wild at Heart; the ear in the grass in Blue Velvet; the Red Room in Twin Peaks — so it makes perfect sense that the late director started out a painter and sustained a complementary career in that field.
At 14, he had his own art studio. At 18, a place to study painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, though he found its students overly conformist and dropped out. Things went better at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Lynch fell in love with Philadelphia’s soot-belching industrial terrain and “corrupt, fear-ridden” vibe. Art school was also where he crossed over into film, when late one night at the easel, he heard a wind, saw the leaves in his painting move, and thought, “Oh, a moving painting”. His first film, a looped one-minute animation of vomiting heads with a siren for a soundtrack, came out of that; of “wanting to make a picture move”, though in his mind the two disciplines were not diverging strands but of a piece, and came from the same place: an “ocean of pure vibrant consciousness”, as he would describe it years later.
“With photography, with film, with sculpture; with every sort of medium you can imagine, everything for him related back to this practice of imagination that started with painting,” says Genevieve Day of Pace Gallery, which represented Lynch from 2022 until his death last year and is about to open an exhibition of his work in Berlin, ahead of a larger survey in his hometown of Los Angeles in the autumn.
Pace and Lynch had already begun work on the Berlin show, which will now mark what would have been the much-mythologised creator’s 80th birthday. “It was a space that he loved architecturally,” explains Day. A former gas station, Pace Berlin has the same raw industrial patina that so enthralled Lynch in 1960s Philadelphia, and which he continued to seek out all his life, including in the north of England, where he’d “always heard that the great, great hell-like, fire and smoke and power was”, he said. A set of photographs he took of desolate old factories in Berlin will debut in the show.
A trio of the functional standing lamps (or “sculptures with light components”, as they are sometimes described) that Lynch liked to fashion from wood, steel, resin, Plexiglas and plaster will also be on display. Light — as any Lynchhead will tell you — was integral to the dream-textured, darkly comic but inherently sinister feel of his screen worlds. In Mulholland Drive (2001), flashing lights mark the transition between realities. In Eraserhead, his 1977 debut feature, chiaroscuro lends an old steam radiator the imposing anatomy of a cathedral. A floor lamp used for the Sheriff’s Department in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) sold recently at auction for $26,000.
The first series of that small-town mystery blew viewers’ minds and serial TV drama out of the water when it aired in 1990 (35mn Americans tuned in to watch), granting the genre a new freewheeling sense of plasticity. Without it, no Sopranos, X-Files or Desperate Housewives, which riff in their own distinct and brilliant ways on the sine qua non principle of Lynchian drama: that behind the closed doors of modern suburban life, all manner of dark and screwy stuff is lurking.
Something of the same quality wrinkles through Lynch’s paintings, with their strange protagonists, slippery phrases and distorted surfaces. “They’re unsettling, yes, but I don’t think he ever thought of them as negative images,” says Bill Griffin, also of Pace. “They tap into this subconscious that he was always very curious about . . . There’s a surrealist influence in that, but he went way beyond it in what he was pulling out of himself, out of the universe, and putting into these art objects.”
“One of his big things,” says Sabrina Sutherland, Lynch’s longtime producer. “was to just sit and seemingly space out and daydream. That was an act of work for him, and important to him. He was thinking, but it was active, concentrated thinking; really figuring out the next step.”
On set, it was her job to turn Lynch’s visions into reality. “It was usually an image he had in mind and he knew exactly what he wanted and would describe it down to a fine tooth comb,” she says. “It might involve me getting hold of some strange object. Like hot dogs and a spatula, which seems ordinary but not if you’re in the middle of the woods somewhere. And if for whatever reason I could not deliver, he would throw other ideas in: ‘can we do this?’ — he always said there were a thousand ways to skin a cat — and everybody was willing. He respected every person. He looked every single person in the eye, and somehow we’d skin that cat.”
Lynch often credited his mother — who only permitted him to paint or draw freehand on paper, never colouring books — for the fluency and reach of his visual imagination. A high school friend’s artist father was another early mentor. “David was very committed even when he was young,” says Griffin. “Boom: ‘this is what I am and what I wanna do’ — and that threaded through his entire life. You saw it when you went to his studio, the world he created there. It was like another universe. It was a home for him.”
The actor Isabella Rossellini, whose star turn in Blue Velvet won her an Independent Spirit award (the two were also in a relationship from 1987 to 1991) helped smooth Lynch’s entry to the art world by introducing him to the eminent New York dealer Leo Castelli. An exhibition at Castelli’s SoHo gallery in 1989 in effect established Lynch’s art bona fides and his work has been shown all over the world since, notably at a 40-year retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2007, though the largest by some measure was at Maastricht’s Bonnefanten Museum in 2018, with a staggering 500 works.
“David never took a moment really for himself,” says Sutherland. “He was always working, whether it was painting or building something. I mean, if your shoe broke, he’d want you to bring it in so he could fix it. He was a great human being. You felt like you were the only person in the room when he spoke to you. That even though he ran the boat, you were there helping with the oars.”
Pace Gallery, Berlin, January 29-March 29, then Los Angeles, September 13-November 7, pacegallery.com
