March 9, 2009
In the Bunker
An interview with David Lynch:
“I love paint,” he says, in the same mechanical tone he used to describe his camera. “I like watercolours. I like acrylic paint … a little bit. I like house paint. I like oil-based paint, and I love oil paint. I love the smell of turpentine and I like that world of oil paint very, very, very much.”
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In 1967, Lynch was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He had made a painting and he wanted to “see it move”. So he projected a one-minute animation onto a sculptured screen and added a siren soundtrack on a loop. The result, Six Men Getting Sick – which was shot on reversal film so has no negative – is mesmerising.
Lynch’s book on Transcendental Meditation is fascinating. Especially the audiobook, which he read in that flat, mechanical Montana monotone of his.
I listen to it when I walk the dog.
As a student-worker/trash-dumper at Arkansas State University, I remember working, on occasion, in the Fine Arts building. I was arrested by a smell I’ve come to know (to have known) as “linseed oil.” I associate it, and can smell it in my olfactory memory, when I visit museums where paintings are exhibited. Years ago in retail, I don’t know if the fragrance is still available, in Ralph Lauren’s “Monogram,” I believe linseed oil to be the “top note.” So much it smelled like (or my memory of the smell of) the art department of ASU.