man, always challenging things, and he was taking a lot of upper and downer drugs, which didn’t help. Finally he realized that what he really wanted to do was be an artist, and that’s what he did. The marriage didn’t survive that decision.
“Bush understood something nobody else did at the time, which was that David really and truly wanted to be an artist,” David Keeler continued about his brother, who died in 2012. “Bush thought he was at a good point in life to get a boost with that, and I guess David wasn’t getting it from his parents, so Bush was absolutely fully behind him. David often stayed at his house, and Bush made space in his studio for David to work.”2
Lynch’s commitment to art deepened further when he met Jack Fisk during his freshman year, and they laid the foundations for an enduring friendship that continues to this day. Now a widely respected production designer and director, Fisk—who went by the name Jhon Luton at the time—was a rangy, good-looking kid born in Canton, Illinois, the middle in a family of three children; his sister Susan was four years older, and his sister Mary was a year younger. Following the death of Fisk’s father in a plane crash, his mother married Charles Luton, whose job overseeing the building of foundries required the family to make frequent moves. (Later in life Fisk reverted to his birth name, as did his sister Mary.) Fisk attended a Catholic military school as a boy, and at various points the family lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan; Richmond, Virginia; and Lahore, Pakistan. Finally, they settled in Alexandria when Fisk was fourteen years old.
“David and I had heard about each other because we were both interested in painting,” said Fisk. “I remember him standing in a doorway at school introducing himself—he told me he was a sophomore, but I knew he was just a freshman. We sometimes laugh about the fact that he lied to me that day. I was working as a soda jerk at Herter’s Drug Store, and he came there and got a job driving their jeep around, delivering prescriptions.”3
Lynch’s job took him all over town, and he didn’t go unnoticed. “I had a newspaper route, and for maybe two years before I met David I’d see this guy with these little bags, knocking on doors,” said artist Clark Fox, who attended high school with Lynch. “He didn’t quite fit in. If you had your hair long back then it was kind of rough, but he had his hair as long as it could be without getting in trouble, and he was really pale. He always had a tie and jacket on when he was working for the drugstore. He was very distinctive.”4
Fisk’s childhood had been tumultuous while Lynch’s was bucolic and secure, and their temperaments were different, but the two of them shared the goal of committing their lives to art, and they fell into step. “Because I’d moved around so much I was kind of a loner, but David was easy to make friends with. Everybody liked him,” Fisk said. “When David talks you want to listen, and he was always that way. David was eccentric from the start, too. We were in a straight 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
