the world from city to city. Trains have always played an important part in Dylan 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.
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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