The master of weird

‘Oh … I Have a New Shirt’,a big,mostly beige piece that packs a punch,depicts a man with extraordinarily long arms grasping a folded shirt in a cardboard box,as if he’s showing off a gift. But in the lower left corner of the painting,a woman lies in a pool of blood. The top half of her body is out of the picture,but what’s there is not a pretty sight. She’s still wearing black spike heels,but her baby blue skirt is hiked up,exposing a bare rump. A hand-lettered sentence above the corpse informs viewers: “my girlfriend died last night”.

Well,what did you think Lynch would paint? An arsonist tossing a burning pine cone into a house? A woman in a neck brace threatening her husband with an electric knife if he doesn’t hurry up and change the TV channel? Those images are here,too,part of an artistic outpouring completed in the last year or so.

“I love the show,” Lynch says,in a freewheeling conversation at the gallery. “The space is what you want. It’s not a museum space,but the big room is impressively big and real tasty for work.” The feast that he has set out for public consumption includes expansive,multifaceted scenes that have “a kind of Renaissance thing I like,” he says. Smaller works,mostly portraying distorted heads,are “in a different world,a little bit more of an absurd world. They are kind of like sophisticated cartoons.” As for the text in the paintings,he likes its shape as well as its meaning. “Sometimes it’s like a title,” he says,“but it’s also important for a kind of story.”

In sharp contrast to the darkness of his art,Lynch comes across as a surprisingly sunny guy. Thoughtful and gentlemanly at 63,he deals with questions about ideas in his work by waxing philosophical or describing basic processes of “sitting and thinking” and “moving a pen or pencil around,like daydreaming. It’s hard to take credit for anything,” he says,“because it just comes along. I don’t know how it happens.”

“When you are working on a film,you focus on that,and there’s very little time to do anything else,” Lynch says of his on-again,off-again art-making schedule. “But in between I always paint.”

Lynch,a native of Missoula,Montana,decided to be an artist at 14,while living in Alexandria,Virginia. After taking Saturday classes at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington,D.C.,in his last year of high school,he spent a year at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,before moving on to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Lynch moved to Los Angeles in 1970 and maintains a studio in the Hollywood Hills. He has travelled widely and is looking forward to exhibitions in Germany and Poland.