David Lynch: The Unified Field - 6abc Loves the Arts

Halloween may be over but the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has a spooky exhibition that lasts into the New Year. It's called David Lynch: The Unified Field, and it's the first major museum exhibit to display the works of the renowned film director and visual artist, David Lynch.

Lynch attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the late 1960's, and says he drew much of his artistic inspiration from some of his hard times spent here in Philadelphia.

"I never wanted to go to Philadelphia," says Lynch, "there were surreal things happening and absurd things happening...there's so many stories of things that happened they all go together and that's why I say it's my biggest influence, Philadelphia, the city of Philadelphia."

Lynch says he used his surroundings and personal experiences to fuel his creative vision, and he stepped outside of the box, blending different forms of artwork and expression into one.

"He made the leap from just painting and drawing in 2 dimensions to using sculptural form and to using film projections, says PAFA Senior Curator and Curator of Modern Art Bob Cozzolino, "it wasn't anything in particular that he took and then transcribed verbatim, it was what the feeling and the mood did to him when it got down and mixed up with his own creative juices that produced such a fruitful body of work."

Lynch even incorporates insects, cigarettes and other foreign objects and unusual materials into his pieces-a fact he doesn't disclose to viewers of his work.

"He likes you to guess and he likes you to just kind of get excited by the idea that you're not just looking at a typical painting with a pristine surface, that parts of the real world are sort of integrated into it," explains Cozzolino.

You can see David Lynch: The Unified Field through January 11th.

For tickets, go to www.TheArtsInPhilly.org.