BOBDYLAN
American, b. 1941
Award in 2001. In addition to winning eleven Grammy Awards, he has achieved six entries in the Grammy Hall of Fame, which honours recordings of ‘qualitative or historical significance’ at least 25 years old. Dylan dates the origins of his work as a visual artist to the early 1960s. The public first saw his artwork on the cover of the album, Music From Big Pink by The Band in 1968 and on his now iconic Self Portrait album cover of 1970. 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 Bob Dylan on Canvas exhibition at Halcyon Gallery marked a new phase of the artist’s career with his first- ever paintings in acrylics. 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 executed on tour in Brazil into richly coloured depictions of countryside, cityscape and various characters including musicians, card players and troublemakers. A further artistic landmark for Dylan was his first New York show in autumn 2011, when The Asia Series, which reflected on his time spent in China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea, was exhibited. During 2012, Dylan released his thirty-sixth studio album, Tempest , and was awarded America’s highest civilian
Bob Dylan is one of the world’s most influential and groundbreaking artists. In the decades since he first burst into the public’s consciousness from New York City’s Greenwich Village folk music scene in the early 1960s, Bob Dylan has sold more than 125 million records and amassed a singular body of work that includes some of the greatest and most popular songs the world has ever known. He continues to traverse the globe each year, performing more than 100 concerts annually in front of audiences who embrace his new material with the same passion as his classic output. During the last six decades he has released more than 50 albums and written in excess of 600 songs, some of the most famous being ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. His songs have been covered more than 6,000 times by artists as diverse as Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, Guns N’ Roses, Stevie Wonder, Rod Stewart, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bob Marley, Pearl Jam, Neil Young, Adele and U2. Dylan’s contributions to worldwide culture have been recognised and honoured with many awards. He received an honorary doctorate of music from Princeton University, New Jersey, in 1970 and another from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, in 2004. President Clinton presented him with a Kennedy Center Honor at the White House in 1997, recognising the excellence of his contribution to American culture. Dylan’s song ‘Things Have Changed’ from the film Wonder Boys (2000) won him an Academy
Photograph: John Shearer
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