by David Lynch
Emily Stofle had been eager to start a family since she and Lynch married, and in November she finally got pregnant. “Before we had our daughter, David said, ‘Why can’t I be enough? Why do you have to have a baby?’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, I just really want a baby,’ and he said, ‘Then I need you to know that I have to do my work and I don’t want to be made to feel guilty. Things change when a woman has a baby, and it becomes all about the baby, but I have to do my work.’ Then after I had Lula he disappeared into his work, which is what he does. David is kind, he has integrity, and he totally believes in the things he does—he would never do something just for the money. He’s not good at close relationships, though, and it’s not like he has a group of friends he spends time with. He works and that’s where he gets his joy.”
Lynch has never been one to hang out and party—he’d rather be making something—but he has a unique gift for intimacy. He has nicknames for many of his close friends—Laura Dern is “tidbit,” Naomi Watts is “buttercup,” and Emily Lynch is “puff”—and people tend to confide in him. “I was breaking up with a girlfriend and went into the painting studio one morning,” Barile recalled, “and David said, ‘Michael, something’s not right.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m having a bummer day,’ and he said, ‘Pull up a chair,’ and we talked and he gave me really solid advice. David lives this art life that’s somewhat disconnected from the world, but he has an understanding of life that’s really deep.”
“David exists in an art bubble he created himself, and he’s rampantly creative,” Zebrowski agreed, “but he’s still a loyal friend I can always count on. I know that if I picked up the phone and said, I need your support, David would be there immediately. Most of us have very few people in our lives we feel we can even ask, and with David I know the support will be there. I think of him as a kind of benevolent uncle.”
The people who work for Lynch tend to remain connected to him, and although Erik Crary left his job in 2008, he checked in with Lynch when he co-wrote and produced his first film, Uncle John, which was released in 2015. “We finished mixing the film on a Friday and I called David and said, ‘Is there any way I can show you the film? I’m not asking for anything, but it would be incredible to show it to you.’ So on Monday morning we showed it to him, and he dug it and we had a nice talk afterward. A few weeks later I called and asked if it would be okay if we used one of the nice things he said as a quote. For us, who are nobodies in the film world, that would be huge, and he said, ‘Why don’t I just write you something?’ Which he did.”
On Christmas Day, Lynch announced that all he wanted for Christmas was cigarettes, and he resumed smoking. Coincidentally or not, he slid onto the saddle of his next massive project then, too. “Right after Christmas, David met Mark Frost for lunch at Musso & Frank’s, and that’s when they started talking about doing Twin Peaks again,” said Emily Stofle. “It was a secret and he didn’t want to talk about it, but in 2012 Mark started coming up for lunch and they’d sit in David’s painting studio and write. That went on for many years.”
As Twin Peaks: The Return began emerging from the mist, Lynch’s focus remained on painting, and in 2012 he had exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In May of that year Lynch was contacted by Louis C.K. with an invitation to guest-star on his self-titled television series as Jack Dall, a cynical show-business veteran who’s seen it all and had his fill of entertainers. To Louis C.K.’s surprise, Lynch said yes.
“David does maybe one percent of the things he’s asked to do,” said Mindy Ramaker. “He doesn’t like to go out, he doesn’t stay current with people working in the industry other than his circle of longtime collaborators, and his favorite thing is to be home working. He doesn’t even like going out for dinner. When Rick Nicita left CAA, David said, ‘If I can’t have Rick, I won’t have an agent, and it will be fun, because I don’t want people to find me, anyway.’ He loved being off the grid, and he doesn’t have things like managers, agents, and publicists around.
“I don’t know how Louis C.K. got my email address, but he wrote these beautiful emails explaining why he wanted David to be on his show,” Ramaker continued. “David said, ‘I can’t do it. Why don’t you get somebody like Martin Scorsese?’ Louis C.K. said, ‘No, it has to be you,’ and David said, ‘All right, send the scripts,’ and that sealed the deal, because the scripts were funny. Then David said, ‘Okay, what are we really talking about here? Can I wear my own clothes? Can you find a hotel where I can smoke?’ They found a hotel where the fine for smoking was five hundred dollars and just paid it, and David flew to New York by himself and shot it.”3
The emails from Louis C.K. were indeed persuasive. “I can tell you all kinds of things about how well received our show has been in the last two seasons with reviews and nominations and bla bla bla but I’d rather take the time you’re giving me by reading this to say that I have a feeling you would enjoy the work and be proud of the outcome,” the comedian wrote. “In case this is the only communication I ever have with you, I want to thank you for your work and for your generosity of spirit and for communicating to the world your views about creativity and life. Watching your films (and Twin Peaks) gave me license as a film maker and a writer, to commit to the stories, moments, feelings, characters, moods, open questions and colors that I might have otherwise let my fears and other people’s fears talk me out of.”
When Lynch agreed to do the show, Louis C.K. replied, “Holy Toledo. That’s amazing.” Then, a few weeks after the shoot wrapped in New York, Ramaker received another email from him. “I am cutting the episodes with David now and they are electrifying. He is Henry Fonda incarnate. It’s really unbelievable. Such a great performance. The best actor I had on the show this season. And it’s David Lynch. How great is that?” Lynch’s episodes—“Late Show, Part 2” and “Late Show, Part 3”—aired in September, shortly after the birth of his fourth child, Lula Boginia Lynch, on August 28th. (Boginia is the Polish word for goddess.)
Right around then Ramaker contemplated quitting her job. “I thought, Okay, I’ve learned everything there is to learn, it’s time to move on,” Ramaker recalled, “and when I told David he said, “Is it something I did?” When I reassured him it wasn’t, he said, ‘Can I help in any way? Is there someone I can call on your behalf?’ He was really generous. It’s a testament to David that the people who work for him stay for a long time. Most of his assistants are there for at least seven years, and I still haven’t left David’s world.”
Throughout 2012 Lynch and Frost chipped away at the Twin Peaks: The Return script, and during that period he continued to spend a good deal of time in recording studios. In 2013 he released The Big Dream, his second collaboration with Hurley, and did one-off projects with Swedish singer Lykke Li, Nine Inch Nails, and Dumb Numbers.
Lynch is a good sport, and on August 27th, 2014, he participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge. A stunt conceived to increase awareness and raise funds for research into ALS, a motor-neuron disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, the challenge requires the participant to submit to having a bucket of water with ice dumped onto his or her head. Lynch was challenged to participate by both Laura Dern and Justin Theroux, so he was doused twice by Riley Lynch, who manned the bucket. Lynch added coffee to the first bucket, so it was an iced-coffee shower, and he played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the trumpet throughout. He then challenged Vladimir Putin to participate in the challenge.
On September 13th, 2014, The Unified Field, a survey of Lynch’s early work, opened at his alma mater, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. “The show at PAFA had special meaning for him because he has fond memories of the time he spent there,” said Skarbek, who accompanied Lynch to the show, which was curated by Robert Cozzolino. “Philadelphia was a place where he was able to dive deep into his art, and he worked uninterrupted on his painting there as a young man alongside his best friend, Jack.
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bsp; “He was seeing Philadelphia for the first time in quite a while when we went to the show, and he thought it had become way too clean,” Skarbek continued. “What he’d loved about the city was its grittiness and danger, but it’s gentrified now, and of course there was graffiti. David hates graffiti and the way it’s taken over places he loved, because it dates things. When he lived in Philadelphia he could walk down an empty street and feel like it was 1940, and graffiti erases that possibility.”
Fundraising for Lynch’s foundation was an abiding concern, then and now, and in September of 2015 Ramaker shifted her energies there. “Erik Martin offered me a job at DLF Live, a division of the Foundation developed in 2012 by Erik and Jessica Harris to organize live fundraising events. I got to know Erik through the Malkovich project, which we both worked on,” said Ramaker of Playing Lynch, a twenty-minute film created by photographer Sandro Miller and director Eric Alexandrakis, which stars John Malkovich portraying eight different characters created by Lynch. Funded by website builder Squarespace, the film premiered in October of 2016 at the Foundation’s Festival of Disruption fundraiser in Los Angeles.
On October 6th, 2014, Lynch confirmed via Twitter that he and Frost were working on a new season of Twin Peaks, and the game was on. Lynch didn’t anticipate what a struggle it would be to nail down an acceptable deal with a network, but the show began picking up momentum. As Lynch became ever more consumed by his work, Stofle focused on being a mother and co-founded Alliance of Moms, an organization that works with pregnant teenage mothers in foster care.
Lynch still hasn’t had a major retrospective exhibition in America, but he’s been the subject of quite a few in countries around the world. In December of 2014 the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in the U.K. mounted Naming, a survey of work from 1968 through the present that included drawings, paintings, photographs, and films. A respectful review broadcast on the BBC described Lynch as “an artist engaged with many aspects of art in the post-war United States: the urban environment, the strangeness of language, and the legacy of Surrealism.”
Four months later, Between Two Worlds opened at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. Organized by José Da Silva, senior curator at the Australian Cinémathèque, the show began percolating in his mind in 2013. “David is criminally underrated as a visual artist,” said Da Silva. “Other than the Fondation Cartier, no one has really paid attention to his studio practice, and people simply aren’t aware of the breadth of his work. When I researched what had been written about his art, I was amazed by how little critical analysis there was, and his body of work is enormous. Between Two Worlds was a very dense show, with a lot of material, but I still felt like it was just skimming the surface.
“David’s a multi-faceted artist who happens to use film for some of his work, and today it’s not unusual for artists to work across media,” Da Silva continued. “David came of age before that started being done, though, and it put him at a disadvantage in terms of how seriously his art is taken. The reviews of our show were mixed. Critics accustomed to interdisciplinary work loved it, and conservative art historians didn’t like it and responded with a kind of base critique—you know, ‘bad painting, juvenile ideas.’ You got the sense they went into the show predisposed to feel that way. Reviews aside, it was an extremely popular show, particularly with young people, who loved it and found it simultaneously compelling and disturbing.”4
By the beginning of 2015, Lynch was dickering with Showtime over the terms of the contract for Twin Peaks: The Return and was involved in a complicated snarl of other projects that would drive most people nuts. He’s structured his life so that multiple projects can be handled, though, and to a remarkable degree his life is an exercise in pure creativity. “David sort of lives like a monk, and it’s my job to relieve him of any distraction,” said Barile. “He hasn’t pumped gas in thirty years, he doesn’t think about where his next meal’s coming from—lunch just appears—and that allows him to dedicate all his time to daydreaming about the next project. It’s amazing how he’s managed to set his life up. He’s in good health, and I think that’s because he doesn’t have the stress that ravages most people. I think he’s going to outlive me.”
It’s a privileged life, and Lynch relishes some of the perks of his position. In other respects he lives as modestly as he always has, for no other reason than he likes it that way. “David’s been through a lot but he hasn’t changed at all,” observed Jack Fisk. “I was staying at his house not long ago when I came to L.A. for a meeting, and I remember looking out the window in the morning and seeing him in his driveway dressed in a white shirt and dirty khaki pants—he’s always loved khaki pants—picking weeds out of the cracks in the concrete and putting them in a bag. He still loves doing things like that.”
THE AIR IS ON FIRE was the first time I was able to see a lot of my work together, and that was a beautiful thing. It’s always been the case that if you do one thing you’re not supposed to do other things—like, if you’re known as a filmmaker and you also paint, then your painting is seen as kind of a hobby, like golfing. You’re a celebrity painter and that’s just the way it was. But around the time I had that exhibition, the world started changing, and now people can do anything. It’s way, way good, and that show put me on the map. I have Hervé Chandès to thank, big time, Melita Toscan du Plantier, the head of the Fondation Cartier, Alain Dominique Perrin, and Matte, who was Alain’s wife at the time.
I met Matte at a party at Dennis Hopper’s house and we ended up sitting on a couch talking. A few days later Dennis’s wife, Victoria, brought Matte by the house, and she saw a big painting I did called Do You Really Want to Know What I Think? Matte sometimes organized exhibitions for a place in Bordeaux, and she contacted me later and said, “I know you’re a photographer and I’d like to show some of your pictures. Could you bring some with you the next time you come to Paris?” The next time I was there she and a friend came to see me at the Lancaster Hotel, and we sat in the living room and looked at photographs. They loved them and she showed some in Bordeaux.
Daniel Toscan du Plantier was a friend of Isabella’s and was a refined, knowledgeable guy who produced films. Whenever I showed a film at Cannes, Daniel was always the first one waiting for me outside and he’d give me a little synopsis and tell me what he loved about the film—he was a really good guy. One night in Paris I was invited to a dinner and Daniel was there, and Jean Nouvel, the architect who designed the Fondation Cartier building, was there, too. That night I think I also met Daniel’s wife, Melita, and somehow she was involved with the Fondation—she didn’t work for them, but she had some sort of association with them. After dinner they wanted me to see the show at the Fondation, so we all went over there and I saw the show and the space and that was it. Not long after that, Daniel was at the Berlin International Film Festival, and when he stood up after having lunch with someone, he fell over dead. Then Melita was a widow with two kids.
A while later, Melita came to visit and she said, “You know, you should really have a show at the Fondation.” She was sort of speaking on behalf of them, and I said maybe so, and one thing led to another. So it was Melita who got the thing rolling, but it was also Matte—the two of them got word to Alain and Hervé, and next thing I know, Hervé is here looking at work. We just kept finding more and more and more, too. Stuff was coming out of everywhere. It was kind of weird because I hadn’t done anything in the art world for a while.
I went to Paris for the installation, and the second day I was there Hervé said, “I want to show you this place,” and I met Patrice [Forest] and saw Idem. I walked in and smelled that printer’s ink, and I caught the mood and the vibe of that place and instantly fell deeply in love. Patrice said, “Would you like to do a lithograph?” and I said, “Do birds fly?” Because of piracy, digital images become cheaper and cheaper, and they’re easy to steal and share. A lithograph is something you can have,
though, and when you have it you see the beauty of the paper and you smell the ink. It’s so different from a digital image.
That started things and Idem became my home away from home. Everything about working there is great. The coffees from the place next door are great, the mood of a Paris printers’ studio that’s nearly one hundred and fifty years old, the machines, the stones, and the people that work there. I do woodcuts there too, and I’ve started painting in the back room. I love the environment and I love France.
I like to do little drawings of kind of old-fashioned interiors, sometimes with people and sometimes just furniture and rugs and walls, and I made one of these drawings when we were installing the show in Paris. When Hervé saw it he said, “We’ve gotta build this,” so they built it as part of the exhibition. I got so many offers for shows after The Air is on Fire, and it inspired me.
After The Air is on Fire opened, Maharishi put me on the tour of sixteen countries. Unreal. We went everywhere and I loved doing this for Maharishi. Before a talk I always felt low, but every time I finished one I felt high, so even though it was a torment it was worth it, and every day I’d talk to Maharishi and tell him how the talk the night before went.
