David Lynch: Painting in Film

Abstract

Artistic genres and categories have been mixed up and conflated since the 19th century, with one art being able to lead into another: Romanticism saw the phenomenon of writers who were painters and vice versa, such as William Blake or Victor Hugo, and poets who were art critics, such as Théophile Gautier and Baudelaire. Baudelaire spoke of the beautiful fatality of his time, of the very laws of modern aesthetics: art, he suggested, needs another art in order to exist, as if it were to find its own identity through the strange nostalgia of what it is not. Every art pushes the limits of its own nature and aspires to gain what it lacks: painting wishes to be prose, poetry to be music or colour, a dramatic canvas or a tale. This is how cinema — a composite medium, and impure art par excellence — feeds on diverse artistic forms. As said by Scorsese: ‘Although film is primarily a visual medium, it combines elements from all the arts — literature, music, painting, and dance.’¹ And often the most accomplished directors make films after having worked in theatre, as in the cases of Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles; or after having been inspired by literature, as in the case of François Truffaut; or in the case of many contemporary filmmakers by television. For his part, David Lynch — who works in all of today’s visual media, from watercolours and oils to the Internet — began as a painter. In 1964, he studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., entering the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia the following year; this was a bright period both for American art and for this celebrated school.

[…] what would be truly surprising would be to find that sound could not suggest colour, that colours could not evoke the idea of a melody, and that sound and colour were unsuitable for the translation of ideas, seeing that things have always found their expression through a system of reciprocal analogy […]

Baudelaire, The Salon of 1846