Pretty As A Picture

“People do different things. This is some of the different things I do” – David Lynch

Finally got around to watching my latest NetFlix arrival – Pretty As A Picture : The Art of David Lynch.

I thought it was going to be simply an overview of David’s paintings, drawings and cartoons, when in fact it was an exhaustive artistic biography, covering everything from his early films, painting, furniture making, music collaborations with longtime associate, Angelo Badalamenti, photography, writing and his more popular films.

The film includes interviews with friends, family members and coworkers, each giving insight into David’s artistic process and telling some great tales. One of the most poignant parts is when David, Jack Nance, Catherine Coulson and Charlotte Stewart, the cast of Eraserhead, revisits the stables of the American Film Institute, where David was living illegally for the five years it took to complete the film. The easy camaraderie between the old friends is heartwarming. Not long after this visit, Jack Nance died, and the documentary is dedicated to his memory.

It was really nice to see David, relaxing with a old friend, and telling the story of the real life origins of Jack Nance’s classic line in Twin Peaks, “Fellows, don’t drink that coffee! There was a fish, IN the percolator!”

And near the end, David and his producer, Deepak Nayar, give two conflicting tales about the origin of Twin Peak’s Bob, (“About matters of money Deepak is never wrong, but he has this story very wrong.”) and Lynch goes on to acknowledging the beautiful synchronicity of “accidents”.

Ideas are the best things going. Somewhere is all the ideas. They are sitting there. And like a spark, it is seen, known, felt all at once. You get a burst of enthusiasm – you fall in love with it. An excitement. But fate plays the biggest part.

From an appearance on Jay Leno, David talks about his cheese head sculpture (which is featured on Julee Cruise’s CD The Voice Of Love), about how he took a ball of cheese and turkey and encased it in clay, and then exposed the cheese and meat by making holes for the mouth, eyes and ears. He then “mounted it on a small wire hanger” and it was his complete Gordon Cole / Dale Cooper tone of voice that sent me over the edge. It was great. He left this sculpture in his kitchen, where he was being invaded by ants (sugar ants, he says, that were looking for water), and watched and photographed the ants over a period of the four days it took for them to empty the head. In talking about the ants, a group he has great respect for, David says, “Ants are tireless workers. If you give them a project they can do, they’ll do it. No questions asked, no unions.” He still refers to himself as an “ant wrangler”, and his son, Austin, chimes in saying that to this day, any ant discovered in the Lynch household is escorted outside to safety.

Jack Fisk, Lynch’s old friend tells a wonderful story, one that gave me shivers, because I immediately agreed with Lynch…

One day he was showing me a painting he made of a dock or a wharf in greens and blacks. It was thick with oil, and right as he showed it to me a moth flew into the painting and got stuck - it flew around and its wings created a little circle in his painting, spiral patterns - sort of like the death of a moth ... I thought David would pull the moth out and repaint it, but he fell in love with it the way it was.

So would I.

This revelation leads to a discussion about how Lynch uses bugs and dead animals and meat and maggots as texture in his works. He is fascinated by organic textures and claims that it needs to be looked at just as much as anything else.

One of the best summations of Lynch’s work comes from Mel Brooks. He explains that Lynch is like Braque, Picasso or Seurat, painting and filmmaking in strange globs and dots. If you stay in the middle of it, it all looks like unconnected globs of paint, but if you get a way back, get an overview, you can then see “the brilliant patterns in his soul.”

Absolutely lovely.