Bob Dylan: Mood Swings
Halcyon Gallery, London, November 16th to January 25th
“Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work.” – Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One
The Drawn Blank Series is Dylan’s most comprehensive and familiar body of visual work to date. During an experimental phase between 1989 and 1992, Dylan began to sketch, rapidly, in order to “relax and refocus a restless mind.” He chronicled his life on the road: in between gigs, on trains, in cafés, backstage. The drawings, mainly done in pencil, a few in charcoal and pen, trace his everyday observations, his thought process and his vision. As a complete collection, they give us a rare glimpse into a private world that is at once open and closed, implied and un-implied.
The black and white drawings have a quiet, honest simplicity. Dylan’s marks are not always perfect – rough around the edges, scruffy, naïve at times – but they capture an intimate, informal sense of everyday life, the coming and going of a man on a journey. They have a sense of spontaneity and an open expressiveness that gives them a true feeling of authenticity and a vulnerability that is convincing. At the time, Dylan chose not to exhibit his drawings publicly, instead producing Drawn Blank, an artists’ book that was published in 1994.
Dylan is, as we know a great storyteller. His sharp sense of awareness allows him to take ordinary, mundane details from daily life and translate them into evocative, experimental studies. The images are straightforward, uncluttered, they give a snapshot of the transient life and fleeting encounters of a man on the road, always moving from one place to another. There is a feeling of disconnect – a sense of being removed from the subject matter, lingering in the sidelines, peeping through windows and quietly observing from a distance. It is this juxtaposition that haunts Dylan’s work, the result of a complex mind both immersed and withdrawn.
In 2007, Dylan revisited some of his early black and white sketches. Using a combination of watercolours, gouaches and acrylics, he painted over scaled-up digital versions by hand, adding intense bursts of colour and breathing new life into them. He painted different variations of the same image, playing with colour, emotion and atmosphere. Dylan is a master colourist and his ability to transform an image through striking tonal shifts shows the skill of an accomplished and ambitious artist. While the imagery remains static, it is the changing colourations that create an emotional intensity and impulsiveness that differs in each work. Again and again, Dylan is able to tell a new story, triggering a fresh interpretation that allows each image to stand independently and not solely as part of a collection.
Train Tracks is one of the most iconic drawings from The Drawn Blank Series. The image, of a train track receding into the distance, with no beginning and no end, is perhaps most reminiscent of Dylan’s journey. Having played more than 2,500 shows since June 1988, Dylan continues travelling across the world from city to city. Trains have always played an important part in Dylan’s music, writings and art. In his autobiography, he writes: “I’d seen and heard trains from my earliest childhood days… The sound of trains off in the distance more or less made me feel at home, like nothing else was missing, like I was at some level place, never in any significant danger and everything was fitting together.”[1]
Produced exclusively for Halcyon Gallery, Sidetracks is a running series of 327 unique prints, each hand embellished by Dylan. In each version, he uses the same coloured reproduction as his starting point, but the colour and texture vary depending on the brushstrokes, with each image a more nuanced version of the last. A parallel can be drawn here – between this process of re-working the same graphic to provoke a new set of emotions – and Dylan’s music.
When performing, Bob Dylan strives for the original – so that the audience rarely hear the same version twice. The same progression is true of Dylan’s hand embellished prints. “That which he has done for years on the stage – performing new versions of his old songs in order to give a fresh interpretation – he’s now continuing on deckle-edged paper.”[2]Dylan revisits the same image, re-colouring, re-configuring and re-imagining it; each time producing a new interpretation… and the series multiplies. By doing this, he reveals a flicker of his passing journey, repetitive on the one hand, as he travels from one city to another, but ever changing. Dylan’s prints demonstrate his ability to adapt and refine the original, manipulating our feelings through his revisions. Like their creator, they are themselves on a journey, always evolving, changing, expanding, never still.
Each print in the series has been dated and named by location, evoking a specific time and place on Dylan’s continuous journey.
Commission from Halcyon Gallery – essay to accompany exhibition catalogue
[1] Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One, London: Simon and Schuster, 2004, p.31
[2] Tobias Ruther, The Drawn Blank Series, London, 2008, p.5
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