A Minnesota curator remembers filmmaker David Lynch

Filmmaker David Lynch died Thursday. Minnesota curator Robert Cozzolino organized the largest American museum exhibition of David Lynch’s visual art in 2014 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Cozzolino remained in contact with Lynch afterward.

MPR News senior arts reporter and critic Alex V. Cipolle spoke with Cozzolino about Lynch, his legacy and how he was first and foremost a painter and printmaker.

How did you know David Lynch?

Robert Cozzolino: When I was working in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which is a museum and school, a colleague of mine who is a curator of contemporary art, he and I were making lists of alumni at PAFA, and David Lynch came up right away.

I had seen interviews with him, where he talked about how Philadelphia was a critical time in his life and in his artistic career. So, I said, “Why don’t we reach out to him? Has anybody ever thought about doing something with them?” So we were like, “Why don’t we try?”

He responded and said, “I’m interested.” He told us that the only reason he responded is because it was the Pennsylvania Academy and because his years in the late 60s in Philadelphia really represented a turning point in his life, not only because it’s the first place that he started to make film, [but] the thing he regularly pointed to is that Philadelphia was a terrifying, scary, dark place to him at that time, and that environment, rather than repelling him, it stimulated his imagination, and it was exactly the kind of — he said, it was solid gold for a young artist.

What did you learn from his art collection that the average person doesn’t know?

Cozzolino: It was just so clear that painting was his first love, and not only being an image maker but being somebody who’s really interested in textures and what paint feels like.

I was deep in the project, and it was almost done, and I went back and looked at all of his films. When I went back and looked at all the films, it really was remarkable how slow they are, how much the camera lingers on a particular sort of scenarios or arrangements of people, or are things in a room or long shots down a hallway, and how much light and dark is handled in such a technically refined way — which is partly a cinematographer that he worked with, Fred Elmes, but all of the shots are really defined by and controlled by David Lynch.

I worked very closely with David Lynch for many years on the show [“The Unified Field”], and I promised him that my job was to look at his visual art — so look at his paintings, photographs, etchings, all the prints he had done, his drawings, as one manifestation of his total creative output.

He was very sensitive to the idea that people thought of him as a filmmaker who happened to dabble in painting, but painting was always his first love. I argued in the [exhibition] catalog essay that you can’t really understand the films unless you look at his history as a painter, and you look at the kinds of visual art he made in two dimensions.

Because he was really thinking from that first epiphany that he ever had, which is sitting in a studio and looking at a painting that he had on his easel and hearing a wind come through the window and imagining that things were moving, and thinking, “Oh, I should make a moving picture. That’s what I should make, something that moves.” So he started animating his drawings and paintings.

What was he like in person?

Cozzolino: He was really kind and thoughtful and down to earth. People are surprised by that.

Of course, he’s recognizable. His films are immediately recognizable. You know who made them. But as a human being, his persona is so well known. People know what he looks like. He’s so distinctive.

When he was being moved between buildings, or we were taking him places, people would recognize him, and they would freak out, and they would come up to him. He was the one who wanted to linger and talk to people. He was happy to sign stuff that they were bringing to him. His assistant at the time, she was trying to get him to move along, and trying to protect him.

But he wasn’t bothered. He loved that people wanted to talk to him, and felt joy about getting a selfie with him or whatever.

What do you think his legacy will be?

Cozzolino: It’s a detriment to kind of seeing the whole person, that we often compartmentalize them based on the thing that is most popular.

You know, he also made music. He collaborated with different musicians and put out albums. But I think visual art is the through line, and it’s the thing that he felt, I think, the strongest about, being serious as a maker, especially printmaking.

I hope that as people are remembering him and thinking about his impact, they start to find out more about the other things that he did, besides film.