The world mourns the loss of David Lynch, the groundbreaking filmmaker whose surreal landscapes and nightmarish storytelling revolutionised cinema. Many cultural commentators across the last week and preceding decades have referenced the influence Francis Bacon had on the director’s creative journey.
Bacon’s exploration of suffering, isolation, and anguish seems to have resonated strongly with Lynch and both artists returned repeatedly to the themes of psychological unease and the subconscious in their works.
During an interview for the Los Angeles Times in 2007 Lynch admitted: “I can’t think of a more influential artist than Francis Bacon”.
He went further in an interview with The Guardian in 2014, saying that: ‘“There’s a rawness and a certain energy in Bacon’s paintings that really spoke to me.”
Similarities between many Bacon paintings and iconic scenes from Lynch’s most iconic works are not hard to find. Farout magazine picks out Portrait of a Man, 1953 and Two Figures at a Window, 1953 as visual inspiration for Twin Peaks, as well as comparing the look of the protagonist of Lynch’s 1980 masterpiece The Elephant Man to Bacon’s ‘Self-Portrait’, 1969.
Furthermore, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive all explore familiar themes of fragmentation and emotional dislocation, using surrealism to express extreme psychological states.
For more observations of the influences and connections between the two artists, watch Lynch’s interview at the Paris PHOTO event in 2011:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI7NOKDhndE&t=161s
Also The Art of David Lynch by VoorDeFilm in 2017:
