Side Tracks
“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. 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 It is this juxtaposition that haunts Dylan’s work, the result of a complex mind both immersed and withdrawn.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
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