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 great admiration for Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s erotic comedy Lolita. He has fond memories of seeing A Summer Place, with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue, too. Although his brother recalls Lynch seeing films by Bergman and Fellini during those years, David has no memory of them.
Lynch’s most significant girlfriend during his teenage years was Judy Westerman: They were voted the cutest couple at school, and there’s a picture in their high school yearbook of the two of them on a bicycle built for two. “David had a really straight girlfriend, but he also used to date some of the ‘fast’ women at school,” said Clark Fox. “He used to talk about what he referred to as these ‘wow women,’ and although he didn’t get into a lot of detail about them, I know they were kind of wild. He was intrigued by the wild side of life.”
Fisk recalled that “David and Judy were pretty tight, but it wasn’t one of those relationships that developed into anything physical. He wasn’t really a ladies’ man, but he would have fascinations with women.” When Lynch met Fisk’s younger sister, Mary, there was no instant fascination, but they both remember that first meeting. “I was fourteen or fifteen when I met David,” recalled Mary Fisk, who became Lynch’s second wife, in 1977. “I was sitting in the living room at home and Jack walked through the room with David and said, ‘This is my sister Mary.’ There was a brass vase holding cigarettes in the living room, and I guess that shocked him because his family didn’t smoke. I don’t know why, but for some reason he’s always associated me with cigarettes—he’s often said that.
“David was going steady with Judy Westerman then, but he was really in love with Nancy Briggs,” Mary Fisk continued. “I had a crush on David the summer before my senior year and I was smitten—he has an extraordinary ability to connect with people. We went on a few dates but it wasn’t serious, because we were both dating other people, too. That was the summer after David and Jack graduated from high school, so we all went our separate ways that fall.”5
Lynch graduated from high school in June of 1964, and three months later his father’s work took the family to Walnut Creek, California, just as Lynch started classes at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. At the same time, Jack Fisk began studies at Cooper Union, a private university in Manhattan. It was and is an excellent school—at the time the faculty included Ad Reinhardt and Josef Albers—but Fisk dropped out after a year and headed to Boston to reconnect with Lynch. “I was shocked when I entered his apartment, because it was full of paintings and they were different kinds of paintings,” Fisk said. “They were orange and black, which was kind of bright for David, and I was impressed by how much he’d done. I remember thinking, My God, this guy has been working. One reason he was able to produce so much was because he stayed home and painted instead of going to school. School was a distraction for him.”
It’s interesting to note the disparity between Fisk and Lynch’s involvement in art and what was happening in Manhattan, which was the international center of the art world at the time. The heyday of abstract expressionism had passed, and late modernism was conceding the playing field to pop art, which had catapulted to the front lines in terms of advancing the narrative of art history. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were developing new strategies for bridging the gap between art and life, and conceptualism and minimalism were on the march. Boston was a short train trip to Manhattan, where Fisk was living, but what was happening outside of their studios seems to have been of marginal interest to Lynch and Fisk, who were following the lead of Robert Henri rather than Artforum. For them, art was a noble calling that demanded discipline, solitude, and a fierce single-mindedness; the cool sarcasm of pop and cocktail-party networking of the New York art world had no place in their art-making practices. They were romantics in the classic sense of the word and were on another trajectory entirely.
By the end of Lynch’s second semester in Boston his grades were circling the drain, and after failing classes in sculpture and design he quit school. Getting out of Boston was not without complications, though. “He made a mess of his apartment in Boston with his oil paint, and the landlord wanted him to pay for the damages, so my dad hired an attorney to negotiate a deal,” said John Lynch. “Dad wouldn’t yell at you but you knew when he was angry, and I think he was disappointed in David.”
Where to next? Bushnell Keeler’s brother had a travel agency in Boston and wrangled free flights to Europe as tour conductors for Fisk and Lynch; their duties began and ended with meeting a group of girls at the airport and escorting them onto a plane. The two of them headed to Europe in late spring of 1965, planning to study at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, an institution located in a castle called Hohensalzburg Fortress. Also called the “School of Vision,” it was founded in 1953 by Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka in the city where the squeaky-clean movie musical of 1965, The Sound of Music, is set. Lynch has recalled, “I realized pretty quickly I didn’t want to make my work there.” Arriving two months before classes were scheduled to start in a city that turned them off, Fisk and Lynch were at a loss as to what to do with themselves. “Between us we had maybe two hundred and fifty dollars,
