David Lynch was a painter before becoming the visionary director we all know, the father of Twin Peaks.
Perhaps not everyone knows that Lynch, in the early years of his career, preferred canvases and brushes to the camera.
The Art Studies
As a young man, in the 1960s, he began studying art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and decided to travel to Europe in the footsteps of the Austrian expressionist artist, Oscar Kokoschka.
In the short film, Curtain’s Up, created by Tête-à-Tête, which the director collaborated on, it tells the story of his beginnings.
“I was a painter. I painted and attended an art school. I wasn’t interested in films. One day I was sitting in a huge studio, in front of me was an unfinished painting, depicting a night garden.”
Lynch, Black and White Lithographs
In the following years, his first works emerged, created through the technique of lithography with contrasting tones of black and white.
However, Lynch will never fully explain the meaning of these paintings. On the contrary, in an interview, he stated:
“I don’t really think about things so precisely, but ideas come, and it’s interesting to contextualize them in what brings them forth.”
In 2018, the International Center of Graphic Arts (MGLC) in Ljubljana showcased Fire on Stage, seventy graphic prints by Lynch, mostly from private collections.
