LOS ANGELES: David Lynch, the American filmmaker, writer and artist who scored best director Oscar nominations for Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive and co-created the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, died at age 78 on Thursday.

`It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch,` a statement on Lynch`s Facebook page said. `There`s a big hole in the world now that he`s no longer with us. But, as he would say, `Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole`.

With his visually stunning, disturbing and inscrutable works filled with dream sequences and bizarre images, Lynch was considered a master of surrealism and one of the most innovative filmmakers of his generation.

He received an honorary Academy Award in 2019 for his lifetime achievements.

The enigmatic artist and devotee of transcendental meditation preferred not to explain his complex, bewildering films, which included Wild at Heart, the 1990 Palme d`Or winner of the Cannes Film Festival, the 1977 horror film Eraserhead and the 1997 mystery Lost Highway.

`A film or a painting, each thing is its own sort of language and it`s not rightto try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there,` he told The Guardian newspaper in a 2018 interview.

His style of filmmaking prompted the term Lynchian, which Vanity Fair magazine described as weird, creepy, and slow.

In his films Lynch inserted the macabre and disturbing into the ordinary and mundane and heightened the impact with music.

Lynch said that he was not only interested in the story, but also the mood of a film, set by the visual elements and sound working together.

`His eye for the absurd detailthat thrusts a scene into shocking relief and his taste in risky, often grotesque material has made him, perhaps, Hollywood`s most revered eccentric, sort of a psychopathic Norman Rockwell,` the New York Times said in 1990.

Lynch, a former Eagle Scout who was once described by producer MelBrooks as `Jimmy Stewart from Mars`, grew up to be a counterculture icon, but his roots were firmly planted in small-town, wholesome America.

David Keith Lynch was born on Jan 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, the eldest of three children.

His father worked for the US Department of Agriculture and the family moved frequently. Lynch once described his childhood as a `very beautiful, sort of perfect world`. But as an art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the 1960s he encountered the seedier side of America while living in a crime-ridden, rundown area of Philadelphia with his wife and baby daughter. He described the city as the biggest influence of his life.

The experience inspired Eraserhead, his unsettling, hallucinatory debut feature that became a cult hit in midnight cinemas.-Reuters