Defining His Style
The first child of Donald Lynch, a research scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, and Edwina (Sundholm) Lynch, David Keith Lynch was born on Jan. 20, 1946, in Missoula but lived there for only a short time. The family soon moved to Boise, Idaho, and then to Spokane, Wash.
The deep timberlands of the Northwest left a profound impression on Mr. Lynch, providing the settings for “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks” and its 1992 movie prequel, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.”
Donald Lynch was transferred east; his family relocated first to Durham, N.C., and then Alexandria, Va., where David attended high school and became interested in painting. After graduation, he attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before entering the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1966.
Philadelphia, then in a state of urban decay, was a revelation. The city had “a great mood — factories, smoke, railroads, diners, the strangest characters and the darkest night,” Mr. Lynch said in a 1997 interview. “I saw vivid images — plastic curtains held together with Band-Aids, rags stuffed in broken windows.”
Mr. Lynch, whose morbid, faux-childlike canvases were made under the spell of Francis Bacon, began incorporating film loops in his paintings. Although he dropped out of art school in 1967, he remained in Philadelphia for another three years, painting and making short films.
