I wanted to capture Lynch not as a man, but as a concept, as a channel for something beyond. I never thought of his face as a normal human face: it is a landscape, a battlefield between order and chaos, between dream and nightmare. Every line drawn on that face is a crack from which mystery flows. I started with the lines, sparse, red, almost cruel, as if they were the nerves pulsing under the skin. I didn't want the portrait to be realistic: I wanted it to be alive.
Lynch has always talked about the importance of diving into the depths of the self, like a diver reaching beyond what is visible to the darkest layers of the soul. Perhaps his ideas never “came” to him. Perhaps they were always there, floating in his unconscious, like pieces of driftwood, which he just patiently fished out, one by one, to build his personal dream mill.The truth is that Lynch does not invent; Lynch listens. And what he listens to, between the hum of fluorescent lights and the hiss of a rewinding cassette tape, are messages from another world. Perhaps our own. But seen with eyes that cannot lie.