PAFA responds to David Lynch’s death: ‘A loss to our community’

Among those mourning the loss of auteur director David Lynch Thursday was the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which brought the famed filmmaker to Philadelphia in the late 1960s and, in some ways, set him on the path to becoming the artist known today.

“His passing is a loss to our community and to the world of the visual arts,” a PAFA spokesperson said in a statement. “We extend our deepest condolences to his family and friends around the globe.”

Lynch enrolled in the school in 1965, when he was 19, to study in its advanced painting curriculum. There, The Inquirer previously reported, Lynch began an interest in filmmaking, having been struck by a desire to see his paintings move.

As a student at the school, he make his first film, 1967′s Six Men Getting Sick, which brought together “painting, sculpture, sound, film, and installation,” PAFA’s spokesperson said. A four-minute student film, that initial foray into moviemaking cost a reported $200.

The surrealist filmmaker would go on to live in Philadelphia for about five years, a period during which he met and married his wife, Peggy, saw the birth of their daughter, Jennifer, and began to establish himself as one of the country’s foremost filmmakers. Lynch would move to Los Angeles after receiving a scholarship from the American Film Institute.

Philadelphia, Lynch had said, was “his greatest influence.” It was also, as he told the BBC in 1987, among the “sickest, most corrupt, decadent, fear-ridden cities that exists.”

Lynch returned to PAFA in 2014 for David Lynch: The Unified Field, a retrospective of his work at PAFA that the school’s spokesperson called “the first major museum exhibition in the United States of his work.” During his time in town that year, Lynch spoke of Philadelphia during an appearance at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute.

“In the atmosphere there was fear, there was violence, there was despair, and sadness,” Lynch said in 2014. “There was a feeling of insanity...This kind of seeped into me.”

Philadelphians, meanwhile, have since nicknamed the Callowhill neighborhood where Lynch spent much of his time the “Eraserhood,” after his beloved 1977 feature debut Eraserhead. Lynch in 2014 called that film “my Philadelphia Story.”

Lynch’s cause of death and location were not immediately available Thursday. Last year, Lynch revealed that he had been diagnosed with emphysema, and did not expect to make another film.

His family announced the filmmaker’s passing on social media, writing that “there’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us.”

“But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole,’” the family’s post read. “It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.