Study of Balladine in Brown Ink, 2025. Brown ink and gouache on vellum, 4 x 6 in.
This is the first work that I’ve made in color since August of 2023. According to Pantone, brown is a color, right?
Balladine changes her look from time to time: I wanted to see how she looked with her hair worn back rather than parted in the middle as usual.
I went on to develop this into a charcoal, mixed media, and gouache drawing. See my post about it or the finished drawing.
A notification from the Times stunned me into awareness from an afternoon nap with its deadpan delivery of crushing news: “David Lynch, avant-garde filmmaker, dies at 78.”
I’ve written about Lynch and his work on several occasions: most notably, I reviewed his 2019 exhibition, Squeaky Flies in the Mud, at Sperone Westwater for Hyperallergic. I had the privilege of meeting Lynch during the show’s opening reception. I wish I could say that we had a deep conversation about the nature of creativity, but we briefly talked about furniture and whether one of the lamps in the exhibition had been used as a prop in Twin Peaks: The Return or not.
More recently, I wrote about how Lynch ended Twin Peaks: The Return for Digitally Downloaded. I hadn’t imagined that this would be the ending not only of Twin Peaks, but of Lynch’s cinematic oeuvre. A state of confusion, a scream, and the lights cut out. The end.
Aside from Twin Peaks, the Lynch film that affected me the most was Blue Velvet. In his autobiography, Lynch wrote about filming Blue Velvet after the commercial and critical failure of Dune, a quote that resonates with me and my present life situation:
“After Dune I was so far down that anything was up!
So it was just a euphoria.
And when you work with that kind of feeling, you can take chances. You can experiment.”
— David Lynch
When I started outlining The Vaster Conspiracy, I wanted the viewpoint character to be an art and artifact counterfeiter, but I didn’t want his motivation to be solely financial. I wanted his life and career to have a hidden layer lurking beneath the surface, something that bubbles up at the most desperate and inconvenient moments, motivating him beyond the mere acquisition of funds.
Two coincidences turned Vaster Vrain into the character he is now. The first was a placeholder line that I wrote in the first draft without even thinking about it:
“Following a twisting hallway that had recently been repainted bile green in a failed attempt to hide generations of graffiti, Vaster took his keys out of the side pocket of his steel-colored Rasalhague suit pants and pushed on the door to an apartment. It swung open.
’Lexie? You still alive?’ Vaster slammed the door shut and clicked the locking mechanism in a single motion and threw his keys back in his pants pocket. ‘Didn’t burn the place down yet?’”
I never intended for that last line to have any deeper meaning than a snarky throwaway comment, but as Lynch would have put it, I had caught an idea on the hook, and as the draft developed, I reeled it in. It ended up being a big one.
The second coincidence involved Blue Velvet directly. As the first draft progressed and I fleshed out Vaster, I found myself increasingly inspired by Frank Booth: the character’s volatility, paranoia, and fundamentally weird relation to sex ended up meshing with my vision for Vaster the counterfeiter.
Blue Velvet’s paradoxical “In Dreams” scene has always affected me: what is it about this song that so deeply cuts through Frank’s layers of psychological scar tissue and psychopathy? Characteristically, Lynch never answers this, making the scene far more powerful for it.
As a nod to my inspirations, I ended up giving Vaster his own “In Dreams” sequence, a moment in which he tries to pray at a shrine of Lucca: “A silent prayer, like dreamers do.”
“As Cinehilde and Meissa whispered words in a language he didn’t understand, Vaster stared at the gleaming pillar, at the flickering candlelight bouncing from its white polished surface, at the red dancing flame atop the tallow candle and the liquified fat oozing down its sides and sizzling as it hit the cool metal pan of the candle holder. He held his other hand open and imagined her hand in it, stubby little fingers pressing into his palm. The burning wax and fat and incense caught in his throat as he remembered the last time he saw her. He remembered how she held her copy of Ashera against her chest, the well-worn book he had read to her over and over when she was little. He remembered how he had promised to read it to her again after he returned. But he returned to an empty loft with no sign of her or Ashera. Both had vanished. Another bead of fat liberated itself from the tip of the candle and worked its way down. Maybe she was somewhere better. Somewhere with greater freedom and less pain. Somewhere where his own failures and fuck-ups couldn’t hurt her anymore. The bead of fat fell from the candle and hit the pan with a soft sizzle.
Cinehilde released Vaster’s hand. ‘Do you feel better?’
’Not really.’
’Good.’”
Once I started drawing the characters and scenes from The Vaster Conspiracy, I wanted to do an homage to the scene in Blue Velvet that inspired this sequence and my vision of Vaster as someone with a secret kept locked away beneath layers of criminality and substance abuse.
Study of Vaster Praying at the Shrine of Lucca, 2023. Charcoal, black chalk, and gouache on vellum, 8.5 x 11 in. Private collection.
I could spend hours writing about how Lynch’s style has affected my artistic practice: doubles and doppelgangers, actors playing actors playing roles, the supernatural lurking beneath the surface of reality, the significance of dreams and hallucinations, fragmentation and allowing the audience to participate in the formation of the work… But, for now, I will mourn the loss of a great artist, filmmaker, and person. “And now it’s dark.”
Study of Balladine’s Bird, 2025. Ink and gouache on vellum, 4 x 6 in.
The character of Balladine has changed drastically since I started the first draft of The Vaster Conspiracy. Originally named Claudine, she started off life as a stock housekeeper character who did little more than answer the door at Cairngorn House. Since then, her role in the story has expanded, to say the least. Her latest character development involves a new hobby: seeking out wounded birds that flew into the Underground City’s ventilation and exhaust fans and nursing them back to health.
This sketch of one of Balladine’s birds was based on a painting by Bolognese Baroque painter Giuseppe Maria Crespi, an artist whose output varied wildly between sacred religious scenes and more informal genre paintings.
The bird, named Gallaper, goes on to appear in a finished drawing of Balladine.