#15. Daniele Bolelli ~ Historian, Host Of ‘History On Fire Podcast’ & Caravaggio Expert Video

David Lynch (1946–2025) was an American filmmaker, painter, musician and writer whose work transformed the boundaries between cinema, dreams and the subconscious. Born in Missoula, Montana, he initially studied painting before attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he became fascinated by the possibility of making paintings move. His breakthrough came with the nightmarish experimental film Eraserhead (1977), followed by The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990) and the television phenomenon Twin Peaks (1990–91), created with Mark Frost. He later made increasingly unconventional films including Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, developing a distinctive language of fragmented narratives, eerie sound, dark humour and dreamlike imagery. Alongside filmmaking, Lynch continued to paint, make music, photograph and design, seeing creativity as something that could be cultivated through discipline and routine; he famously practised Transcendental Meditation and believed that ideas were like fish—you had to go fishing for them. His work ultimately became less about explaining a story than creating a mysterious emotional world that the audience could enter and interpret for themselves.

Frank Auerbach and his son Jake had a complicated but ultimately deeply affectionate relationship. Frank, born in Berlin in 1931, came to Britain as a Jewish refugee as a child, while his parents remained in Germany and were later murdered at Auschwitz; that trauma became an important backdrop to a life devoted to painting people and places again and again, trying to capture their physical presence and permanence. Jake, born in 1958, saw relatively little of his father during childhood, but they reconnected when Jake was 17, and he subsequently became one of Frank’s regular sitters, appearing in portraits over several decades. Jake went on to become a filmmaker, making films about artists and eventually documenting his father, revealing the much more humorous, cultured and sociable man behind the familiar image of the obsessive Camden painter. Their relationship remained close into Frank’s final years, when they would do crosswords together and spend time in London. There is something particularly poignant about the story: Frank had lost his own parents as a child, yet spent his life painting the people closest to him—including his son—while Jake ultimately became one of the people who preserved Frank’s personality and memory for the world. In that sense, their relationship almost mirrors Auerbach’s entire artistic preoccupation: looking at another human being intensely enough to make them remain present, even after they are gone.

Peter Clossick is one of those painters who found the direction of their art early on, a revelatory moment on Hampstead Heath one evening after a day drawing in a shoe design studio in Mayfair, when "looking at a tree and feeling the world, grass, people, the wind, I knew I could draw it as I designed, in a cliched way. But I wanted to draw as I experienced. Which was totally different and the existential question then became how do I approach this thinking and feeling, which became a tactile reaching out into haptic contact. It was my first insight. The years that followed as he returned to art school in the mid-70s, Camberwell, fortunately for him at that time a rare bastion of the Bomberg/Coldstream tradition (colloquially known as the Bombstream') that runs through Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud even to the present day, reinforced that insight, his almost sculptural use of paint an equivalence of matter set against the physical realities of the people, rooms, still-lifes and occasional landscapes he was painting.

Vincent van Gogh spent his final day, 27 July 1890, in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, before returning to his room at the Auberge Ravoux with a gunshot wound to his abdomen. He claimed he had shot himself in the chest in a nearby wheat field, but the wound and the unusual trajectory of the bullet have led some historians to question the official story. Van Gogh survived for another day and a half, dying on 29 July 1890 in the arms of his brother Theo. The alternative theory is that he was accidentally shot by local teenagers, possibly with a gun they were playing with, and that Van Gogh chose to protect them by saying he had taken his own life.

William Hogarth was deeply sceptical of the fashionable Grand Tour, where wealthy young Englishmen travelled through France and Italy to study classical art and culture. He believed that blindly imitating continental art could make British artists lose their own character and originality. Hogarth argued that England itself offered abundant material for an artist, its people, streets, theatres, taverns, landscapes and rapidly changing society. Rather than copying Raphael or the Italian Old Masters, he wanted artists to look directly at life around them. His own paintings and engravings became a celebration, and often a savage satire, of 18th-century English society, suggesting that an artist did not need to cross the Channel to find subjects worthy of great art.