David’s Art Life Print

David Lynch: And I knew, uh, my stuff sucked. But I needed to burn through - I needed to find what was mine. And the only way to find it is just to keep painting and keep painting and keep painting and see if you catch something. David Lynch: When you're doing a painting or whatever... sometimes the past conjures ideas. The past colours them. David Lynch: Philadelphia was kind of a poor man's New York City, so it was a weird town. It was kind of a mean town. One woman, who was my neighbour, *reeked* of urine and she was a complete racist. There was another woman, who was totally crazy. She was a neighbour. Lived down the street with her parents. And she would go around the backyard on her hands and knees and squawk like a chicken and say, "I'm a chicken! I'm a chicken!" And squawk and squawk and go around and around in this tall white grass in her backyard. She came up to me one day on the street and she said, "Oh, my nipples hurt!" And she was squeezing her-her breast and standing in front of me squeezing and shaking. "My nipples hurt!” 
 David Lynch: Then there is, uh, that person I walked by, you know, going to the store to get smokes or something. I’m walking down the street. There’s a very nice lady with her little - her little boy, her little baby on her lap out on the stoop. I’m walking by. I say, “How you doing?” [imitating lady’s sarcastic voice] “How you doing? How you doing?” She turned to her baby and said, “You grow up like that and I’ll fucking kill you.” 
 David Lynch: [on his father's reaction to his artwork] He misunderstood my experiments for some kind of, like, diabolical, you know, man who needs serious help mentally and probably emotionally.
 
 David Lynch: I don’t know when I started using the term “the art life,” but one of the things Bushnell did besides, uh, just being a painter and living it - living, uh, life as a painter, he gave me the Robert Henri book ’The Art Spirit’. And I loved that book. I can’t remember much of it now, but I - we used to carry it around, and ’The Art Spirit’ sort of became the art life and I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes and you paint. And that’s it. Maybe - Maybe girls come into a little bit, but basically, it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life. 
 David Lynch: And Toby told me his father was painter, and that, you know, kind of realization that you could be a painter popped - you know, blew all the wiring, you know. And that’s what I wanted to do from that second. 
 from ‘David Lynch: The Art Life’ (2016) Starring Lula Lynch & David Lynch (Family Guy). Written by Isabel Andrés. Directed by Rick Barnes, Olivia Neergaard-Holm (Border), and Jon Nguyen (The Man with the Gray Elevated Hair). 
 
 David Lynch: The Art Life is a 2016 documentary film directed by Jon Nguyen. The film follows director David Lynch's upbringing in Montana, Washington State, and Idaho, his initial move to Philadelphia to pursue a career as a painter, to the beginning of the production of Eraserhead. 
 Production: David Lynch: The Art Life was made over four years as the filmmakers filmed and recorded over 20 conversations with Lynch at his home. The staff of the film had previously collaborated on making the film Lynch One, which was about the making of Inland Empire. The film received production through a Kickstarter campaign. 
 
 David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, painter, visual artist, musician, and writer. A recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 2019, Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, and the César Award for Best Foreign Filmtwice, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. In 2007, a panel of critics convened by The Guardian announced that 'after all the discussion, no one could fault the conclusion that David Lynch is the most important film-maker of the current era', while AllMovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking". His work led to him being labeled "the first populist surrealist" by film critic Pauline Kael. Lynch studied painting before he began making short films in the late 1960s. His first feature-length film, the surrealist Eraserhead (1977), became a success on the midnight movie circuit, and he followed that by directing The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), and Blue Velvet (1986). Lynch next created his own television series with Mark Frost, the murder mystery Twin Peaks (1990–91), which ran for two seasons. He also made the film prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), the road film Wild at Heart (1990), and the family film The Straight Story (1999) in the same period. Turning further towards surrealist filmmaking, three of his subsequent films operated on dream logic non-linear narrative structures: Lost Highway(1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006). Lynch and Frost reunited in 2017 for the third season of Twin Peaks, which aired on Showtime. Lynch co-wrote and directed every episode, and reprised his onscreen role as Gordon Cole. Lynch's other artistic endeavors include his work as a musician, encompassing the studio albums BlueBOB (2001), Crazy Clown Time (2011), and The Big Dream (2013), as well as music and sound design for a variety of his films (sometimes alongside collaborators Alan Splet, Dean Hurley, and/or Angelo Badalamenti); painting and photography; writing the books Images (1994), Catching the Big Fish (2006), Room to Dream (2018), and numerous other literary works; and directing several music videos (such as the video for "Shot in the Back of the Head" by Moby, who, in turn, directed a video for Lynch's "The Big Dream") as well as advertisements, including the Dior promotional film Lady Blue Shanghai (2010). An avid practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (TM), in 2005 he founded the David Lynch Foundation, which seeks to fund the teaching of TM in schools and has since widened its scope to other at-risk populations, including the homeless, veterans, and refugees. 
 Source: Wikipedia 
 
 
 Artist’s Note: It’s really easy for me to say that this (along with Jim Carrey’s ‘I Needed Color’) documentary was, well in fact, insanely influential when I started painting back 2017. I’d lost count as to how many times I watched it (just kinda had it on repeat). But the advice to just keep painting until you “catch something”, amongst a lot more, pretty much kept me painting for that first year I was working. And it got me back into painting again (after a year and a half hiatus - I just wasn’t feeling it) in the summer of 2019 (along with ‘At Eternity’s Gate’ and ‘Loving Vincent’) when I randomly put it on. It’s just good stuff. And really relatable, well, at least to me. Grazie Mr. Lynch!