Bob Dylan, the Fine Artist?
“I’ve done sketching most of my life. In
notebooks, on napkins, on rough paper or cardboard, plates and coffee
pots...basically when there’s something to look at,” says legendary cultural icon Bob Dylan. While he has drawn and painted for more than 40 years, it wasn’t
until 2007 that his works were first exhibited publicly; his newest show, on
view now at Mark
Borghi Fine Art in Bridgehampton, New York, is dedicated to the
artist’s acclaimed “Drawn
Blank” series. Based on drawings he made while travelling between 1989
and 1992, Dylan’s suite of mixed media paintings express his experiences and
recollections of those images. They depict genre scenes of casual people,
moments, and spaces—a tree-lined park, small town streets, railroad tracks, and
canals. They do not document his life as a musician, but rather catalog life
outside of concerts, rehearsals, and tour buses.
While he cites Max Beckmann and Paul Gauguin as
influences, Dylan employs bright colors that recall Fauvism. Roses
on a Hillside (2010) features a strange and engaging compositional gambit,
spanning a vista that includes an idyllic village in the distance, with
colorful rooftops and a peacefully windswept sky realized through large, quick
brushstrokes in blue and white. The image is ultimately dominated by the
interruption of a single rose, which floats into the foreground from the right
edge, unmistakably recalling Salvador Dalí’s iconic Meditative
Rose (1958), and injecting the work with a touch of Surrealism.
Man on a Bridge (2010) presents the viewer with a
man in a pea coat, standing shyly on a highway overpass. Over his shoulder,
suggestively antiquated architecture hints that this scene could be a canal in fin
de siècle Europe or a highway in the contemporary American Northeast. Both
that painting and Dylan’s Train Tracks (2007) use a similar
compositional device and palette: each employs one-point
perspective to pull the viewer into the receding background of moody purple,
blue, and brown daubs of paint. In both, Dylan portrays a space and time that
is archetypal, rather than wholly documentary. And the early modernist methods
he favors make his scenes of rural American culture unexpectedly elegant.
“Bob Dylan
‘The Drawn Blank Series’” is on view at Mark Borghi Fine
Art, Bridgehampton, NY, July 4th–18th, 2014.
