ACCLAIMED film director David Lynch’s contribution to the 2000 New York City CowParade was rejected. In June of that year, several hundred fiberglass cows were decorated by artists and schoolchildren and were displayed on sidewalks around the city. Lynch, known for the eerie 1990s television drama Twin Peaks and surreal cult movies like Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), was asked for a contribution. He chopped off his cow’s head, stuck forks and knives on its back and covered parts with a blood-like substance. He also scrawled “EAT MY FEAR” on the side. “I don’t think it will be a particularly friendly looking cow,” he announced, and it was returned posthaste.
“I thought it was Charles Manson,” said a parks commissioner to The New York Times. “I don’t know whether it’s shock art or schlock art. David Lynch should stick to his day job, making movies.”
When an Italian TV host recently asked the Cannes Palm d’Or winner (for Wild at Heart, 1990) if the director was working on a new movie project, Lynch answered in the manner of true classified information: “I’m…we’re all top secret!” Last year his daughter and fellow filmmaker Jennifer Lynch disclosed that her father was “trying to make a mind-boggling new movie.” And then actress Laura Dern said this year Lynch is “cooking up” a new film, which is also what she said the year before.
Clearly, the legendary director’s mind seems to be elsewhere. Die-hard fans may love his online weather reports, music videos, concert films, luxury fashion, designer furniture, Dior ads and his tireless campaigns on behalf of transcendental meditation, yet, after the success of his last full-length feature film, Inland Empire, in 2006, fans frustrated by the absence of any new David Lynch film have asked: What gives?
Little do they know that the former Eagle Scout who was present outside the White House during the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, which took place on Lynch’s 15th birthday in 1961, is also a trained artist at heart. Before he got into filmmaking, Lynch attended the Corcoran School of Art, the Boston Museum School and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Lynch’s career as an artist started with painting, and he never had to return to the muse because she was always with him. His recent show at the Tilton Gallery in New York preceded his first museum retrospective in the US, titled David Lynch: The Unified Field, which opened at the Pennsylvania Academy on September 13 and runs until January 11, 2015. It brings together around 90 paintings and drawings from 1965 to present. Prior to that, Lynch had major shows at the James Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles (1987 and 1993), the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York (1989), the Cartier Foundation in Paris (2007) and the Max Ernst Museum in Bruhl, Germany (2009).
Although his visual artworks have received less attention than his movies, he has to be given credit for establishing his own unique artistic style. Recurrent themes in Lynch’s oeuvre include the human body combined with “organic phenomena” in unlikely combinations and the home depicted as a site for childhood memories, flashbacks, nightmares, or passion. Lynch’s ability to suggest the emotional intensity of his subject matter through paint textures, surface effects and physical traces of his hand brings intimacy and empathy to even the most disturbing narratives. Many of his works present a tense, mysterious, scenario suspended in the course of a story. We witness psychologically charged moments isolated out of everyday context, says a preface to the museum retrospective.
Much of his work seems like the scribblings of a madman or a serial killer with a heart of comedy at its core, offering multiple readings, both humorous and ominous. Fear plays a starring role in his art, be it on canvas or on film. For these qualities, his hardcore fans have been asking for a new movie, although I would rather ask for a free painting. One even blurted out in his blog, “Stop making Laura Dern out to be a liar.”
In a world where crossing careers from a successful one into the world of art seems corny, perhaps we may find a most compelling crossover hit in David Lynch.
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