David Lynch: Painting and Photography

Łódź Has a Soul

“Extraordinary remnants of the Industrial Revolution! Places like this hardly exist any more. Łódź has a soul. That’s why I liked it so much”—several years after the opening of his exhibition at Atlas Sztuki, David Lynch was still struck by his first visit to the city, with which he had “fallen in love in an instant”.

During his 2003 exhibition at Atlas Sztuki in Łódź, Lynch presented photographs as well as ten paintings brought to Łódź from Hollywood, where the director lives in the house that appears in his film Lost Highway. He made some of the furniture and lamps used as sets for Mulholland Drive himself.

David Lynch, a three-time Academy Award nominee for Best Director, is a versatile visual artist and musician. He has promoted Transcendental Meditation for nearly forty years and, more recently, has appeared in a surreal project called David Lynch Theater on YouTube.

Lynch initially studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1966, before making short abstract films that he called “moving paintings”—an idea that, according to one anecdote, originated in canvases he saw moving in the wind. With the money he earned from his first commission while still a student, he bought a Bolex Super 8 camera. His transition from painting to filmmaking was fairly accidental, yet when asked whether he would have felt fulfilled had he remained a painter, he answers without hesitation that he would: “That is what I always wanted to do. Just paint. But suddenly film came along. This big thing.”

The paintings shown at Atlas Sztuki are dark landscapes populated by indistinct forms, including works from The Bob Series. The name may reflect the director’s fondness for the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Los Angeles, where he ate breakfast every day, washing it down with “four, five, six cups of coffee”; or it may deliberately evoke the destructive character BOB from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. “You could say that film is like a moving painting, but it also has sound and a story. I like my paintings to have some kind of story behind them. Francis Bacon did not want any narrative in his work, but people can still imagine that story and find it there. You have no control over what the viewer will think,” the artist says. Since the premiere of the cult television series Twin Peaks in the early 1990s, the adjective “Lynchian” has entered common usage.

While making a series of photographs of Łódź factories, Lynch took his camera into the darkest corners of abandoned industrial buildings, poeticising rusted signs, remnants of metal structures and walls marked by the passage of time. The result is a recognisably Lynchian world, perhaps the same one seen in his first feature film, Eraserhead. Equally unsettling are Lynch’s photographs of nudes, whose strong chiaroscuro reveals fragments of female bodies and brings to mind the work of the Surrealist masters.

Lynch visited Łódź several times and learnt about the history of the Łódź Film School and the Feature Film Studio. As a result, he considered establishing a film centre that would support Polish cinema by producing films, carrying out post-production work, recording music and running workshops for film-school students from across Central and Eastern Europe.

Scenes for the director’s most recent feature film, 2006’s INLAND EMPIRE, were also made in Łódź. The film was to have been based on The Green Room in Lodz, a short study shot three years earlier. It failed to win over audiences and divided critics. Lynch said of the film: “I always say that if you love the work, you cannot get hurt. But in a way I was hurt because some distributors lost money on INLAND EMPIRE. I like to think that, over time, people will discover the film and the distributors will one day get their money back.” Lynch had grounds for saying so. It had been much the same with Blue Velvet: the artistic freedom the director enjoyed while making it ultimately paid off, and it is now considered one of the finest films in cinema history. Lynch rejected the opportunity to direct the third Star Wars film, despite the potential profits, because he “did not feel it would be fulfilling”; nor did he finish Dune. Yet he spoke of INLAND EMPIRE as a film on which he had “final cut”.