David Lynch's Ways of Seeing

Remembrances of time spent with the Surrealist filmmaker/artist/photographer, who died this week at 78.

David Lynch, who died this week from emphysema at the age of 78, was not only the avant-garde director of such landmark movies as “Blue Velvet,” “The Elephant Man,” “Wild at Heart,” for which he won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or award in 1990, and the TV series, “Twin Peaks.” He was also an artist who loved to paint—he had a beautiful outdoor studio at his home in Los Angeles—and a very good photographer.

“I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it,” he told film directors Jon Nguyen and Rick Barnes in their 2017 documentary, “David Lynch: The Art Life.” “Maybe girls come into it a little bit, but basically it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life.”

David Lynch in his art studio.

During my time as the European cultural correspondent for Newsweek in Paris, I had several occasions to speak with Lynch about his artistic pursuits.