Fisk. “He came in November of 1965 and we lived there until he started classes in January. The room had two couches, which we slept on, and I’d collected a bunch of dead plants that were scattered around—David likes dead plants. Then, on New Year’s Day, we rented a house for forty-five dollars a month that was across the street from the morgue in a scary industrial part of Philadelphia. People were afraid to visit us, and when David walked around he carried a stick with nails sticking out of it in case he got attacked. One day a policeman stopped him, and when he saw the stick he said, ‘That’s good, you should keep that.’ We worked all night and slept all day and didn’t interact with the instructors much—all we did was paint.”
Lynch and Fisk didn’t bother going to school too often but quickly fell into a community of like-minded students. “David and Jack showed up kind of like the dynamic duo and became part of our group,” recalled artist Eo Omwake. “We were the fringy, experimental people, and there were about a dozen in our group. It was an intimate circle of people and we encouraged each other and all lived a frugal, bohemian lifestyle.”2
Among the circle was painter Virginia Maitland, who remembered Lynch as “a corny, clean-cut guy who drank a lot of coffee and smoked cigarettes. He was eccentric in how straight he was. He was usually with Jack, who was tall like Abraham Lincoln and was kind of a hippie, and Jack’s dog, Five, was usually with them. They made an interesting pair.”3
“David always wore khakis with Oxford shoes and big fat socks,” said classmate James Havard. “When we met we became friends right off because I liked his excitement about working—if David was doing something he loved, he’d really get into it. Philadelphia was very rough then, though, and we were all just scraping by. We didn’t run around much at night, because it was too dangerous, but we were wild in our own way and David was, too. We’d all be at my place listening to the Beatles, and he’d be beating on a five-pound can of potato chips like it was a drum. He’d just bang on it.”4
Samuelson recalled being struck by “the gentlemanly way David spoke and the fact that he wore a tie—at the time nobody but the faculty wore ties. I remember walking away the first time we met and sensing something was wrong, and when I turned and looked back I saw that he had two ties on. He wasn’t trying to draw attention to himself—the two ties were just part of who he was.”
Five months before Lynch arrived at the Academy, Peggy Lentz Reavey started classes there. The daughter of a successful lawyer, Reavey graduated from high school, went straight to the Academy, and was living in a dorm on campus when she first crossed paths with Lynch. “He definitely caught my eye,” she recalled. “I saw him sitting there in the cafeteria and I thought, That is a beautiful boy. He was kind of at sea at that point and many of his shirts had holes in them, and he looked so sweet and vulnerable. He was exactly the kind of wide-eyed, angelic person a girl wants to take care of.”
Both Reavey and Lynch were involved with other people when they met, so the two were just friends for several months. “We used to eat lunch together and enjoyed talking, but I remember thinking he was a little slow at first because he had no interest in the things I grew up loving and associated with being an artist. I thought artists weren’t supposed to be popular in high school, but here’s this dreamy guy who’d been in a high school fraternity and told wonderful stories about a world I knew nothing about. Class ski trips, shooting rabbits in the desert outside Boise, his grandfather’s wheat ranch—so foreign to me, and funny! Culturally, we came from completely different worlds. I had this cool record of Gregorian chant I played for him, and he was horrified. ‘Peg! I can’t believe you like this! It’s so depressing!’ Actually, David was depressed when we were getting to know each other.”
Omwake concurred: “When David was living near the morgue, I think he went through a depressed period—he was sleeping, like, eighteen hours a day. One time I was at the place he shared with Jack, and Jack and I were talking when David woke up. He came out, drank four or five Cokes, talked a little bit, then went back to bed. He was sleeping a lot during that period.”
When he was awake Lynch must have been highly productive, because he progressed quickly at school. Five months after starting classes he won an honorable mention in a school competition, with a mixed-media sculpture involving a ball bearing that triggered a chain reaction featuring a light bulb and a firecracker. “The Academy was one of the few art schools left that stressed a classical education, but David didn’t spend much time doing first-year classes like still-life drawing,” said Virginia Maitland. “He moved into advanced classes fairly quickly. There were big studios where they put everybody in the advanced category, and there were five or six of us in there together. I remember getting a real charge out of watching David work.”
Lynch was already technically skilled when he arrived at the Academy but hadn’t yet developed the unique voice that informs his mature work, and during his first year he tried on several different styles. There are detailed graphite portraits rendered with a fine hand that are surreal and strange—a man with a bloody nose, another vomiting, another with a cracked skull; figures Lynch has described as “mechanical women,” which combine human anatomy with machine parts; and delicate, sexually charged drawings evocative of work by German artist Hans Bellmer. They’re all executed with great finesse, but Lynch’s potent sensibility isn’t really there yet. Then, in 1967, he produced The Bride, a six-by-six-foot portrait of a spectral figure in a wedding dress. “He was diving headlong into darkness and fear with it,” said Reavey of the painting, which she regards as a breakthrough and whose whereabouts are unknown. “It was beautifully painted, with the white lace of the girl’s dress scumbled against a dark ground, and she’s reaching a skeletal hand under her dress to abort herself. The fetus is barely suggested and it’s not bloody . . . just subtle. It was a great painting.”
Lynch and Fisk continued to live across the street from the morgue until April of 1967, when they relocated to a house at 2429 Aspen Street, in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. They moved into what’s known as a “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” row house, with three floors; Fisk was on the second, Lynch was on the third, and the bottom floor was the kitchen and living room. Reavey was living in an apartment a bus ride away, and by that point she and Lynch had become a couple. “He made a point of calling it ‘friendship with sex,’ but I was pretty hooked,” recalled Reavey, who became a regular presence on Aspen Street and wound up living there with Lynch and Fisk, until Fisk moved into a loft above a nearby auto-body shop a few months later.
“David and Jack were hilarious together—you laughed around those two constantly,” said Reavey. “David used to ride his bike beside me when we walked home from school, and one day we found an injured bird on the sidewalk. He was very interested in this and took it home, and after it died he spent most of the night boiling it to get the flesh off the bird so he could make something with the skeleton. David and Jack had a black cat named Zero, and the next morning we were sitting drinking coffee, and we heard Zero in the other room crunching the bones to pieces. Jack laughed his head off over that.
“David’s favorite place to eat was a drugstore coffee shop on Cherry Street, and everybody in the place knew us by name,” continued Reavey of her first few months with Lynch. “David would tease the waitresses and he loved Paul, the elderly gentleman at the cash register. Paul had white hair and glasses and wore a tie, and he always talked to David about his television. He talked about shopping for it and what a good one he’d gotten, and he’d always wind up this conversation about his TV by saying, with great solemnity, ‘And, Dave . . . I am blessed with good reception.’ David still talks about Paul and his good reception.”
The core event of the David Lynch creation myth took place early in 1967. While working on a painting depicting a figure standing among foliage rendered in dark shades of green, he sensed what he’s described as “a little wind” and saw a flicker of movement in the painting. Like a gift bestowed on him from the ether, the idea of a moving painting clicked into focus in his mind.
He
