Iconic Filmmaker David Lynch's First Love Was Painting: "That Was All I Wanted"
Legendary filmmaker David Lynch referred to cinema as "moving paintings."
Published Jan. 17 2025, 10:31 a.m. ET
On Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025, the world lost a true visionary in David Lynch.
The legendary filmmaker, whose successful career spanned over 50 years, died at his daughter's home just five days shy of his 79th birthday.
While tributes from colleagues and admirers have poured in, often celebrating his iconic work in film, we want to take a moment to honor his first love — painting. Here's a closer look at the lesser-known but equally fascinating side of David Lynch's artistic journey.
David Lynch's first love was painting.
From an early age, David Lynch was captivated by painting and drawing. His interest in pursuing art as a career was sparked while living in Virginia when a friend revealed that his father was a professional fine artist.
In a 2019 interview with Artforum, he recalled the moment: "In a millisecond, way less than a full second, I only wanted to be a painter after I heard that," he told the outlet. "It gave me permission, and I knew that was it, and that was all I wanted from that second on."
David began his formal art education at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., before transferring to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1964. After just one year, he left and spent three years traveling across Europe.
Upon his return, the Twin Peaks creator enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, fully submerging himself in his passion for painting.
David Lynch referred to cinema as "moving paintings."
Even as David transitioned to filmmaking, which he referred to as "moving paintings," he continued to paint. In the book Lynch on Lynch, he said that all his paintings "are organic, violent comedies. They must be violently done, primitive, and crude. To achieve that, I try to let nature paint more than I paint."
David's work often featured dark, moody colors, a choice he attributed to his struggles with color itself.
"I wouldn't know what to do with [color]. Color to me is too real. It's limiting. It doesn't allow too much of a dream. The more you throw black into a color, the more dreamy it gets," he explained. "Black has depth. It's like a little egress; you can go into it, and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on in there become manifest. And you start seeing what you're afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.
Many of his paintings also feature letters and words, which David said were meant to provoke deeper thought and "make you start thinking about what else is going on in there."
"A lot of times, the words excite me as shapes, and something will grow out of that," he added. "I used to cut these little letters out and glue them on. They just look good all lined up like teeth ... sometimes they become the title of the painting."
David's paintings have been showcased in many galleries.
His art was the subject of a major retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris from March 3 to May 27, 2007, titled The Air is on Fire. The exhibition included paintings, photographs, drawings, alternative films, and sound works.
His alma mater, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, also presented a show of his work, The Unified Field, which ran from September 12, 2014, to January 2015.
He was represented by Kayne Griffin Corcoran in Los Angeles, where he began exhibiting his paintings, drawings, and photography in 2011.
According to Artnet, David's works are now held in prestigious collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.