David Lynch is at it again with a show of new paintings

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“When you are working on a film, you focus on that and there’s very little time to do anything else, but in between I always paint,” says David Lynch in a conversation at Griffin, a contemporary art gallery in Santa Monica, where a show of his work opened over the weekend.

The exhibition is one of 32 listed on Lynch’s resume, but it’s the first in a long time to introduce a substantial body of new paintings. Thirteen mixed-media works, measuring up to 6 feet high and 10 feet wide, are gritty, witty and every bit as twisted as might be expected from the creative force whose obsessively weird sensibility brought us films such as “Blue Velvet” and “Inland Empire” and the TV series “Twin Peaks.”

“Crucifixtion,” with its intentionally misspelled title written across the background, portrays a cross covered with plastic soldiers and a thickly encrusted mass of flesh crowned by a halo of twinkling electric lights. Another painting, “Oh…I Have a New Shirt,” depicts a man with extraordinarily long arms grasping a folded shirt in a cardboard box, as if he’s showing off a gift. But in the lower left corner of the composition, a woman lies in a pool of blood. Hand-lettered text above the corpse informs viewers: “My girlfriend died last night.”

To read the full story in Wednesday’s Calendar section, click here.

Continue reading below to see more images from the show.

-- Suzanne Muchnic

Top photo: “Crucifixtion” by David Lynch. Credit: Griffin. All other photos by Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times