David Lynch’s art is the key to understanding his cryptic films

It’s silly to try to explain David Lynch’s films, as they are designed to confuse, but that hasn’t stopped people from seeking answers. Fully aware that viewers wanted clarity, Lynch once wrote a list of 10 “tracks” to accompany the DVD release of his 2001 film Mulholland Drive. Discovering the true meaning of each clue seemingly revealed the film’s mysteries; the first stated that two tracks were revealed before the opening credits even rolled.

I spent hours marveling over the first track as a teenager, rewinding and watching the first few minutes Mulholland Drive over and over before realizing as an adult that there was nothing to discover here at all – the film’s enigma could not be cracked, even with Lynch’s help. As well as the rest of his films and TV series, from his 1986 feature film Blue velvet to What did Jack do?a 2017 short film in which Lynch himself interviews a capuchin monkey who may have murdered someone.

A severed ear, animated rabbits, a deformed (and possibly inhuman) baby, a bottomless blue box: these are all strange creatures and objects that mean just that – weirdness. Lynch showed that life was fundamentally enigmatic and therefore impossible to fully understand. The best we can do is take all that weirdness for granted and buckle up for the ride.

But may I suggest that there is at least some way to understand why Lynch wanted to represent the world in this way? For that, I will refer you to his paintings, which he steadily produced along with his films for decades in what he called his “art life.”

I’m not saying his paintings are better than or even as good as his movies. There are times when I agree with the critic Roberta Smith, who once wrote, more than a little harshly, that Lynch’s paintings are “familiar, unoriginal and smooth.” Still, there are many more instances where I find his art also fun and charmingly off-kilter. At the very least, his art is worthy of attention because it offers insight into why Lynch, a trained painter, ultimately moved his wizardry to the canvas.

It is not difficult to find thematic ties between his films and his art. The subject of his 1988 painting The shadow of a twisted hand across my house promotes the themes of Blue velvethis 1986 film about a young man who is drawn into the criminal underworld of a cozy North Carolina town. The painting portrays the familiar elements of the white bread suburb: a small house with a courtyard under a cloudless sky. Yet the sky is black, not blue, and there are no carefully manicured grasses, no green trees, no children playing. Instead, there is a giant hand-shaped tree that seems ready to crush this home in its fingers. Like Blue velvetthe painting reveals the nail-like underbelly of small-town America.

Characters from his films also recur in his art. The horrifying infant at the core of Eraser head was sketched by Lynch long before he even finished that film in 1977. A version of the mask-wearing “jumping man” character from his film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with MeLynch’s underrated 1992 prequel to his TV series Twin Peaksseems to reappear in Ant on my arman undated work that appeared in Lynch’s 2022 Pace Gallery show.

Lynch obsessives will suggest other connections between his artwork and his films, but that’s not what makes these works interesting. What’s notable instead is Lynch’s art-making process, which privileged a handmade aesthetic that wasn’t always so evident when he was behind the camera.

I have a feeling that for Lynch, painting every day was an activity that was more tactile, more physical than directing film. He ate all his surfaces with lumpy, indistinct substance that was never revealed in the checklists for his shows. I asked him about this when I interviewed him in 2018 and he slyly avoided my question, saying only that he used glue, paint and of course ash – he was a habitual smoker. He often spoke of the thick mixture, often combining dried pieces of paint with wet acrylic, as an example of “organic phenomena.” He seemed fascinated by the possibility of exercising these “organic phenomena,” as if he were a medium transforming invisible forces into art.

It is hardly surprising to learn that Lynch was drawn to the art of Robert Henri’s 1923 book The spirit of art. He was still a high school student when he read Henri’s book, which suggested that art could help people discover dazzling forms of creativity and become “clairvoyant” along the way. Before he tried to reach other realms with the help of cameras, he did so with the help of a brush and a canvas.

You can see him trying to summon the spirit world early on in works like an untitled piece on paper made between 1965 and 1969 that was featured in his 2014 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art retrospective. Against a black void, there is a large spray of crimson—perhaps a cascade of blood—placed next to a gaping stomach. It is as if this red current is something malevolent and alien, a force that cannot be stopped.

Lynch also produced figurative paintings in the years following his studies at PAFA, where he was enrolled between 1966 and 1967. These works, too, are largely set in darkness, this time with more clearly defined creatures: women whose mouths curl into knives and machinery parts, men with outstretched arms. As these figures move in and out of the shadows behind them, one can sense Lynch trying to conjure up what cannot be easily seen.

One of the joys of these works is that they cannot be classified – they do not fit neatly into any art historical category. (Robert Cozzolino, the curator of the PAFA retrospective, wrote that Lynch’s paintings share something in common with postwar Los Angeles artists like Llyn Foulkes, who dabbled in a similar kind of unbridled foreignness. Yet the comparison falters because Lynch seemed all the way across the country, in Philadelphia, and anyway Lynch claimed to know virtually nothing about art history.) But another joy of these Lynch paintings is that they refuse to hang together.

It is quite clear that for Lynch, film was a way to make these oblique images even more unequal. Six men fall illhis 1967 painting, which shows exactly what his title suggests, was set in motion when Lynch projected images onto it and filmed the results, effectively making his first film. Gardenbackhis 1968-70 painting of a hunchbacked figure shares its name with an unrealized film written by Lynch that was supposed to center on the concept of cheating.

Film scholars tend to refer to these paintings as a transfer point in Lynch’s oeuvre, as if they were insignificant works that paved a path to greatness. I would argue the opposite: paintings like Gardenback already worked well as a means of channeling other universes, and Lynch simply continued that activity of filmmaking.

I find it helpful to think of his moves as filmed art installations, full of individual works performed by performers. That was certainly the case with Eraser headin any case. Lynch personally made a number of the elements in the film – the highly stylized lighting fixtures remind useless lamps he later showed as sculptures– and he continued to produce art during Eraser head‘s production, with drawings made to help develop the images he wanted to see into reality. Directors usually storyboard sequences before shooting, but these drawings do not describe what he ultimately shot. They were more like sketches produced in advance of an ambitious painting, and in this case that painting was a feature film.

There is a wonderful photograph shot during the production of Eraser head where Lynch can be seen making a drawing between takes. Actor Jack Nance can be seen here awaiting a new roof, but Lynch doesn’t seem very interested in drawing him. Instead, Lynch’s pencil drifts along a paper, forming a cord that wraps around a hand holding a gun. Notably, Lynch has rested his paper on top of a clapboard, using the tools of filmmaking to support his art.