David Lynch has died

Growing up in a surreal cult, David Lynch was my connection with a world outside that appeared simultaneously dreamlike and hyper-real. He was not afraid of magnifying the dark, the twisted, the deformed and the fetishized, but he also really understood beauty. Not just the aesthetics, but the sound, the feel, the movement and the plush sleek alluring pull that informs the texture of beauty.

Nobody else could have made the Elephant Man or Eraserhead so unforgettably spellbinding and moving, without first having empathy by the bucket load and a unique out of body third person appreciation for humanity and what it means to walk around as brain controlled animated skeletons housed in an unbelievably complex bag of water and flesh.

Sherilyn Fenn's monochromatic blue Audrey Horne hung on my wall as a teenager and a weird mixture of menstruating chickens, the radiator lady and Isabella Rossellini's Dorothy Vallens lived inside my head.

In Lynch's hands sound itself was a character that held your hand and walked you through his work. From the organically sourced industrial oddities, shaped and forged into monumental aural strata along with Alan Splet in Eraserhead, through the other-wordly backwards talking in the Red room within Twin Peaks to the ethereal transcendental collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise that gave you permission to both drown in sentimentality and fly in the ecstatic realisation that nothing is real. Sealing a modern classic and distorting into four dimensions the tight envelope of what we all thought a TV serial was before.

Genial as much as genius, his kindness seemed to always batter into submission any easy lean toward cynicism. His warmth informed the totality of the envelope with which he blanketed casts in ensemble pieces and production crews in work that often could have dragged many into unwelcome and terrifying emotional trenches had their dark and twisted undertow not been tamed by a man who sculpted his work with such finesse.

I like so many will miss his presence not just because he will no longer make new work, but because he himself, as in the physical specimen that housed David Lynch, seemed to be a meticulously dressed, uniquely spoken and created element of his own oeuvre.

He was a one off can only ever really be used once, but he was certainly unlike most of us, in very many fascinating ways. He was not only a painter, sculptor and film-maker of the highest calibre, he wrote a comic once about the angriest dog in the world. A dog so angry it couldn't even move. In it he included the quote

“If everything is real... then nothing is real too”

He was right, only nobody else found a way to capture it on film.