school that had fraternities—everybody was in one, although I wasn’t—and all the guys wore madras shirts and khaki pants. David ran for school treasurer—his campaign slogan was ‘Save with Dave’—and we had an assembly where the candidates spoke and he got up to speak wearing a seersucker suit with tennis shoes. That doesn’t seem crazy today, but at the time no one would think of wearing tennis shoes with a suit.”
Lynch won that election for high school treasurer, but at approximately the same time his interest in painting began to eclipse pretty much everything else in his life. “He didn’t want to do stuff like be high school treasurer anymore,” Fisk recalled. “I don’t know if he was removed or he resigned, but it didn’t last long.”
Rebellion is a standard part of most people’s teenage years, but Lynch’s recalcitrance was different in that he didn’t rebel just for the hell of it; he rebelled because he’d found something outside of school that was vitally important to him. “It was unusual in that time and place for somebody like David to get so interested in oil painting,” said John Lynch, “and our parents were upset with how he was going astray. His rebellion began in the ninth grade, and although he never got into trouble with the law, there was partying and drinking, and the first year in Alexandria he snuck out at night a few times and got caught. Then there was dinner. My mom would make normal dinners, but David thought they were too normal—he’d say, ‘Your food is too clean!’ When David was in Boise he was serious about Boy Scouts, but when we moved to Virginia he rebelled against that, too. My dad encouraged him to keep going and get his Eagle Scout rank, and David did it, but I think he partially did it for our dad.”
Lynch bid a kind of farewell to the Scouts on his fifteenth birthday, when he was among a handful of Eagle Scouts selected to seat VIPs for the inauguration parade at John Kennedy’s swearing-in. He remembers seeing Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon cruising by in limousines just a few feet from where he stood.
Impressive, no doubt, but Lynch’s mind was on other things. Martha Levacy said, “Not long after we moved to Alexandria, all David wanted to do was paint, and I was the mediator. I’d talk to David about things that were bothering my parents, then I’d talk to my parents about his point of view, and I tried to keep the peace. Our parents were real patient people and David was always respectful of them so there weren’t big fights, but there were disagreements.”
His cousin Elena Zegarelli described Lynch’s parents as “very straight, conservative, religious people. Sunny was a pretty woman with a soft, sweet voice, but she was strict. I remember being in a restaurant in Brooklyn with the whole family at a birthday celebration for our great-grandmother Hermina. David was sixteen at the time and everybody was drinking wine and celebrating, but David’s mother didn’t want him to have a glass of wine. When you see David’s work it’s hard to believe he’s from the same family. My sense was that because his family was so straitlaced, that made him go the other way.”
Regardless of the constraints he encountered at home, Lynch was on his way. “David had already rented a room from Bushnell Keeler when we met,” Fisk recalled, “and he said, ‘Do you want to share my studio?’ It was really tiny, but I shared the studio with him—it was around twenty-five dollars a month—and Bushnell would come in and give us critiques. Bushnell told him about Robert Henri’s book, The Art Spirit, and David turned me on to it, and he sat around reading it and talking to me about it. It was great finding somebody who wrote about being a painter—suddenly you didn’t feel alone anymore. Because of the Henri book we knew about artists like van Gogh and Modigliani, and anybody in France in the 1920s interested us.”
A leading figure in the Ashcan School of American art, which advocated a tough, gritty realism, Robert Henri was a revered teacher, whose students included Edward Hopper, George Bellows, and Stuart Davis. Published in 1923, The Art Spirit is a usefully technical distillation of several decades of his teaching, and it had a big impact on Lynch. The language and syntax of the book seem dated today, but the sentiment it expresses is timeless. It’s a quietly remarkable and encouraging book with a simple message: Give yourself permission to express yourself as freely and completely as possible, have faith that this is a worthy endeavor, and believe that you can do it.
Early in 1962, when he was sixteen years old, Lynch decided it was time for him to move out of Bushnell Keeler’s studio and get one of his own, and his parents agreed to contribute to the rent. “It was a big step for them to take,” said Levacy. John Lynch recalled that “Bushnell talked to our parents about David getting his own studio and said, ‘David’s not goofing off. He’s using the studio as a place to paint.’ David got a job and helped pay for it, and it was real cheap. In the 1960s there was a section called Old Town that was kind of the skid row of Alexandria. [Today, this area is an upscale district full of boutiques and expensive coffee emporiums.] The streets were lined with brick houses that were built two hundred years ago and were just junk, and one of them that was even less than junk was the one David and Jack rented. They had the second floor, and the building had narrow old stairs that creaked when you walked on them. There was a little partying going on but they really did use it as a studio, and David went there every night and stayed pretty late. He had a curfew, and there was an electric clock he was supposed to unplug when he got home so our parents would know what time he got in. Still, it was always hard for him to wake up in the morning, and Dad would take a wet washcloth to his face sometimes. David hated that.”
During high school both Fisk and Lynch attended classes at the Corcoran School of Art, in D.C., and their focus shifted increasingly to their lives off campus. “I got a failure notice in art in school, and I think David was doing pretty poorly in his art class, but we were painting all the time and had many different studios together,” said Fisk. “I remember one on Cameron Street where we managed to rent a whole building, and we painted one room black and that was where you could go to think. When I first met David he was doing Paris street scenes, and he had a way of doing them with cardboard and tempera paint that was kind of nice. One day he came in with an oil painting of a boat by a dock. He was putting the paint on really thick at that point and a moth had flown into the painting, and as it struggled to get out of the paint it made this beautiful swirl in the sky. I remember he got so excited about that, seeing that death mixed in with his painting.
“If David was going in a certain direction with his art, I found another way to go,” Fisk continued. “We were always pushing each other to get better, and it worked well in helping our work evolve. My work grew increasingly abstract, and David got into painting darker things—docks at night, animals dying—real moody stuff. David’s always had a cheerful disposition and sunny personality, but he’s always been attracted to dark things. That’s one of the mysteries of David.”
Meanwhile, back at home, Lynch’s parents were bewildered. “David could draw the Capitol Building perfectly, and he did drawings of the homes of both of our sets of grandparents that were perfect,” said Levacy. “I remember my mom saying, ‘Why don’t you draw something that looks good like you used to?’ ” Lynch was finding the courage to defy what was deemed normal behavior, and these shifts in his personality took him into rocky waters at home. Some things about him didn’t change, however. Lynch is essentially a kind person, and this was evident in something as simple as how he treated his younger brother. “David and I shared a room in high school and we’d have our fights, but David would do things for me,” said John Lynch. “He was very popular in school, and instead of being ashamed of his little brother, he would kind of bring me in and I would meet his friends, and my friends would sort of become part of that same crowd. Some of my friends were on the nerdier side, too.”
American movies were in the doldrums during the first half of the 1960s when Lynch was a teenager. The social revolution that breathed new life into American cinema had yet to begin, and U.S. studios were cranking out chaste romantic comedies starring Doris Day, beach-party pictures, Elvis Presley musicals, and bloated historical epics. It was the golden era of foreign film, though, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Polanski, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Ingmar Bergman were producing masterpieces during those years. Stanley Kubrick was one of the few U.S. filmmakers breaking new ground, and Lynch has expressed