Stay true to an idea, and let it carry you.

Teachings from some of the greatest artists of our time: David Lynch and Tonino Guerra.

Roses from Blue Velvet by David Lynch

A few years ago I was with my partner driving on a beautiful road in Emilia Romagna. The scorching heat had painted everything yellow, we drove between fields of hay bales surrounded by green hills and listened to Lucio Battisti. We were heading to a place I didn’t remember because I had been there when I was a child, so we followed that long winding road faithfully on our Google Map headed to Pennabilli, a small village in the Apennines, where artist and poet Tonino Guerra created artistic installations and gardens that embodied his love for nature and the human spirit. We parked the car in the small village on a road called “Via dei Pensieri Sospesi” (the road of suspended thoughts), and I knew I had arrived in the right place.

“Absurdity is what I like most in life.”

I didn’t know Tonino but he knew me, he had collaborated with my father on some projects and had grown very fond of him and my mother. We visited his home in Pennabilli often until my parents separated. I grew up surrounded by his creations: mainly his paintings and furniture in my home. For my parent’s 25th wedding anniversary, he painted them surrounded by a sky with 25 butterflies, it read: “25 butterflies fly today”. Tonino Guerra (1920–2012) was an Italian poet, screenwriter, and novelist whose work celebrated the poetry of everyday life. Born in Santarcangelo di Romagna, he began writing poetry during his imprisonment in a German concentration camp during World War II, using verse as a poetic antidote to the darkness of captivity. After the war, his evocative poems in the Romagnolo dialect earned him recognition in literary circles. Guerra's gift for storytelling led him to the world of cinema, where he collaborated with legendary filmmakers like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky. His screenplays, including Antonioni's L'Avventura and Tarkovsky's Nostalgia, are celebrated for their lyrical minimalism and deep reflections on human existence.

When I arrived at his home his lovely wife Lora welcomed us with some tea. The house was filled with objects and cats (alive ones). There were about 20 of them, roaming around the house like it was theirs, softly caressing the furniture with their tails. To avoid being rude, both my partner and I had to temporarily hide the fact that we were severely allergic to cats. I was deeply honoured to be in the home of one of the most incredible artists to come out of my motherland, Italy. As Lora showed us the house she kept interrupting the tour to show us one of Tonino’s creations. “This is the pasta table that Tonino made for me”, “Look at these beautiful tiles” she said indicating the kitchen tiles” These he made one morning because he just felt like it”, “This is where Federico sat”, she said speaking of one of the greatest directors of cinema Federico Fellini, “they would sit here for hours and talk and talk and smoke and drink”. I smiled imagining two geniuses in a mundane moment. We moved around the house and the garden and she showed us old photos, books that he had written, sculptures he created, and furniture he had built.

The road of suspended thoughts in Pennabilli, Italy.

Tonino infused poetry in everything he made, in his town, he created the Orto dei Frutti Dimenticati (Garden of Forgotten Fruits), a poetic sanctuary dedicated to memory and nature. The garden is a celebration of ancient fruit trees and traditional plant varieties that were once integral to rural life in the area but have faded from common use. Scattered throughout the space are whimsical sculptures, stone inscriptions of Guerra's poetic verses, and tranquil corners designed for reflection. Phrases like “It is time that when we meet a tree we say ‘Good Morning Mister Tree”, or “Beauty is the only nourishment that feeds weariness”, at one point in the garden you have 12 tiles hung on a grey stone wall, one for each month, which describe a feeling in that month. August was the one that stayed with me the most: “Agosto, col mare dentro gli occhi” meaning “August with the sea in your eyes” (it sounds more poetic in Italian).

As I observed all this living poetry I felt connected to the sweetness of life, that relentless search for beauty that can belong only to an artist. I say relentless because it is always in the face of some sort of horror, which is inevitable if you exist in this world. Beauty is always coexisting with horror and perhaps is the only way out of it.

I was also impressed by the courage of Tonino to take ideas and turn them into something: whether it was a tile, a street name, or a painting.

This trust in ideas is something that David Lynch, who left this plane yesterday, also advocated for. He said “Nothing happens without an idea”, and he spoke often about doing hours of intentional daydreaming to fish for ideas. But the more I look at the work he did - from the daily weather reports to the music, the book, the shorts, and the moving urinals- the more I see that what creatives need more than anything is to trust in their ideas. “Stay true to an idea then translate it to one medium or another” said Lynch, and as I walked into Tonino’s garden I felt the same thing; this is a man who had an idea and didn’t care if it made him famous, he just trusted that it would do something for someone, and if not at least he enjoyed the process. Lynch not only spoke of ideas, but he also spoke of the power of meditation and inner inquiry as fundamental to the creative life, the art life as he called it. And perhaps this is what parents, teachers, and mentors should be teaching us: how to create an environment where we can trust the ideas we fish. Ideas don’t swim in polluted lakes, they swim in clean landscapes where life can thrive.

David Lynch did so much for artists, and what I love the most is he remained authentic through it all. He often admitted that it also takes fate (luck), to be trusted by the right people at the right time. He recognised the myriad of talented people who get no recognition, but what his life and work teach is that we must not be driven by the success that our work might bring us, we must be driven by the innate desire to create something and to constantly work on cleaning our inner landscapes so that we may find that desire more often and more clearly. Lynch directed ten feature films in his 60-year career, roughly one film every six years, which may not seem like much. These are the creations he is most known for, which teaches that it takes time to develop ideas. But between these big ideas, he was creating something every day, behind these bigger projects are thousands of smaller projects, of tryouts and failures, of random ideas that turned into something that maybe many of us are discovering only now (such as his series What is David working on today?).

“I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.”

David Lynch

So, clean your path, then follow your ideas and trust them blindly, whether they make it to a big audience or not. even if they impact just a few people they have value. This is what people like Lynch and Tonino taught me, that as an artist my value is not only in the things that make it into the world, but it is measured by the belief and hope I have in my ideas, and how much I work I do to make sure that the path between me to my idea is clear.

I have been struggling to accept that my pace has slowed, and that I am in a time of gathering and not producing. I feel like I owe the world my ideas, but I am learning that it takes time to dig deeper. As Lynch said, the big fish live in deep waters, and they are very beautiful.

People like Tonino and Lynch are poetic antidotes in our world, they teach us that beauty often prevails in darkness, that the light is always there for us to see, and even when it feels there is no hope it will ever come back, it always does. I am deeply grateful for people like them, they were great men and will be great ancestors.

Below, I’ve collected some of my David Lynch favourites……