The one Bob Dylan show for which you will not need to queue for tickets is an extraordinary display of 97 new paintings opening next weekend in London – as intimate, resonant and reflective as anything the Nobel Prize-winning music star has created.
Almost everything Bob Dylan sings enraptures, and has done for almost seven decades, but what he paints is a revelatory turn of the key into his soul. He has always drawn, even during his childhood in Duluth, Minnesota, where the clank and clang of cargo ships being welded and hammered in the Midwest led to his obsession with iron and steel structures and the romance and nostalgia for an America viewed through that railroad filter.
His new paintings – shown in Bob Dylan: Point Blank at the Halcyon Gallery – share a Kerouac echo of being on the road: exploring, sensing and interpreting a vision of America. We are shown glimpses, triggered memories and vistas.
We see a cowboy with a pistol hanging from his belt; a saxophonist moodily playing; cityscapes, hard and epic and echt-America; even a painting called “Stairway to Heaven” in the form of sweeping wooden steps. He is what Baudelaire saw as the purpose of an artist: to be a flaneur, a walker and a watcher.
“My dreams are made of iron and steel, with a big bouquet of roses hanging down from the heavens to the ground” are lyrics from his 1974 song “Never Say Goodbye”. And his pictures about to be shown unfold an intimate vision of who and what he sees and imagines while on the road between Europe and the Americas. There are also revelatory words on his interpretation of the role and purpose of the artist.
He reflects that the process of drawing allows him moments when he can “reload and refocus a restless mind”. Some of these paintings take as their base past drawings, to which he has added a layer of vibrant colour. Hints and insights into his inner and outer life are shared through the ordinary, from a set of saucepans to even a Sellotape holder. Dylan elevates these objects through his interpretive forms and colours as he seeks to give them a significance and life of their own.
So what is his art like? There are elements of Edward Hopper and Hockney, with a dash of William Blake’s spirituality and a tip of the hat to Van Gogh. All his art is triggered by a passion to make the everyday remarkable and extraordinary.
Dylan’s artworks are testimony to his poetic vision, channelled and chiselled. Monochrome in his new show has been turned into colour. Railways and roads, faces and folk make up Dylan’s personal odyssey through Americana. It is restless and ruminating and romantic, but always iron-hard in focus and form. The titles of the pictures are like song titles, from “Mr Soup Can” to “Railroad Excavator”. To quote the man himself: “The idea was not only to observe the human condition, but to throw myself into it with great urgency.”
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There are other intense quotes projected onto the wall, almost like a private art tutorial from inside the studio of Dylan: “Take one colour and emphasise the structure, truth and deception of it, whatever it might be. Blazing reds, blues as in the echo of a dream. Muted browns, neon pink, funeral black, green as in love letters, where one colour would emphasise melancholy, loneliness, tenderness, nostalgia etc.”
This is Dylan opening up, the enigmatic poet who seldom explains, as the veil is lifted a little more. We are allowed into his world. The everyday and the personal, with titles as varied as “Nightfall”, “Shake Dancer”, even “Peruvian Potatoes”. He is the poet and painter making all he sees vivid, making it radiate a significance for having been in his life. These images are warm and accessible, but conjured from an obsessive ability to look and decipher.
Just over 20 years ago, Dylan said: “What would I draw? Well, I guess I would start with the typewriter, a crucifix, a rose, pencils and knives and pins, empty cigarette boxes. I’d lose track of time completely.” His gift of time, our gain of timelessness.
‘Bob Dylan: Point Blank’ will open at 148 New Bond Street on 9 May. The exhibition is open daily and is free to enter
