Asturias Award for the Arts and in 2008 a Special Citation Pulitzer Prize “for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” His album Together Through Life (2009) entered the charts at number one in America and Britain, reaching the top position in a total of 15 countries, and he was granted America’s 2009 National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. In addition to winning 11 Grammy Awards, Dylan has achieved six entries in the Grammy Hall of Fame, which honors recordings of “qualitative or historical significance” at least 25 years old. During 2012, Dylan released his thirty-fifth studio album, Tempest, and was awarded America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by President Obama. In 2013, Dylan received France’s prestigious National Order of the Legion of Honor. His thirty-sixth studio album, Shadows In The Night was released to critical acclaim in February, 2015, entering on the charts in the top 10 in 19 countries. Dylan dates the origins of his work as a visual artist to the early 1960s. In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, he writes: ‘What would I draw? Well, I guess I would start with whatever was at hand. I sat at the table, took out a pencil and paper and drew the typewriter, a crucifix, a rose, pencils, knives and pins, empty cigarette boxes. I’d lose track of time completely.... Not that I thought I was any great drawer, but I did feel like I was putting an orderliness to the chaos around.’ A few drawings reached the public’s gaze through various means, including the cover of The Band’s 1968 debut album, Music from Big Pink. A book of 92 drawings titled Drawn Blank followed in 1994, and exhibitions of reworked versions of these images were mounted at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in Germany in 2007 and the following year at Halcyon Gallery in London.
The original Drawn Blank sketches date from 1989 to 1992. Dylan explained that he drew them as a way of relaxing and refocusing his mind while touring America, Europe and Asia. When approached by a gallery wanting to exhibit the works, he returned to the images and reworked them. Digitally enlarging the drawings, he transferred scans onto deckle-edged paper and created 320 paintings in watercolor and gouache, all during an eight month period in 2007. A single picture would emerge as a set, colored sometimes delicately, sometimes brilliantly, with different elements emphasized. “He riffs with color across the same simple black-and- white sketches the way he plays songs in concert, sometimes making subtle changes, other times brutally overhauling them,” commented Marisha Pessl in the New York Times.[iv] “His brush strokes are like his voice: straightforward, rough, occasionally fragile, but always intent on illustrating the treads of human experience.” Two important exhibitions of The Drawn Blank Series took place in 2010 at the Accademia Albertina delle Belle Arti in Turin, Italy, and at the Asahi Exhibition Centre in Roppongi, Tokyo. At Halcyon Gallery, the works were exhibited both as limited edition graphics and, in Bob Dylan on Canvas, as the artist’s first-ever paintings in acrylics. Paul Green, president of the gallery, commented that they were “the culmination of everything Dylan has done with The Drawn Blank Series so far, signaling a new phase in the artist’s career.” As this fresh medium opened up to Dylan during an intensive burst of artistic activity, he completed a significant new group of some 50 paintings, The Brazil Series. In the subsequent exhibition at Copenhagen’s Statens Museum for Kunst from September 2010 to April 2011, visitors saw how Dylan had developed preliminary studies into richly colored depictions of countryside, cityscape and, above all, characters such as musicians, card players and troublemakers. “It would appear that a
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