Raw Humanity: Bob Dylan’s Art and Music

By Hannah Andrews

On the few occasions I pass the little commercial art galleries located in the ‘nice’ part of my town’s shopping centre, I have not once failed to see a Bob Dylan painting for sale. Then, when I go on a day out into Liverpool. I find his works yet again up in every gallery’s window. Part of me wonders: why is he always there? Dylan is a talented artist in many ways, but I would not call him one of the great contemporary painters or sculptors. His works are nice but they are not extraordinary. 

My father is a huge fan of Dylan’s music, and I have been drawing for my entire life, yet I have somehow managed to develop an unconscious antagonism in regards to Dylan’s visual art. His first visual art to be seen by the public was on the cover of the album Music From Big Pink. The colours are muddy, the figures in the piece are abstracted reasonably well with the exception of a truly terrifying creature in the background that appears to be an elephant. Yet, despite my critiques, I can’t help but admit that the work encapsulates the feeling of the album. The clear influence of blues, the playful positions of the musicians and the interesting composition of the artwork. Even though the piece is not formally impressive, nor does it demonstrate the masterful hand of a seasoned artist, it undoubtedly makes me feel.

As Dylan has matured so has his art. His first major exhibition was the Drawn Blank series. The pieces in this collection were mainly painted between 1989-1992 whilst Dylan was on tour. This period coincides with some of Dylan’s greatest musical successes and shames. Releasing his acclaimed album Oh Mercy in 1989 and receiving a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award two years later, Dylan should have been at the height of his musical success, but he was drinking heavily (although Dylan denies this interfered with his work at all), and his album Under the Red Sky was a critical and commercial flop. 

Much like his career at this time, the ‘Drawn Blank’ series is not perfect. It is sometimes unclear whether his choices are a matter of stylization or lack of skill and, although significantly improved, his use of colour can still occasionally be incongruous, but these works are deeply beautiful. The loose linework, the softness of the watercolour and the recurrent motif of mundane landscapes make each work feel as though you are looking through Dylan’s own eyes at his life on the road. Unpolished representations of reality as he experiences it, it’s the visual equivalent of Dylan’s unique and untrained voice.

Unfortunately, Dylan’s art has not continued in this vein. Dylan’s newest collections, ‘The Beaten Path’ and ‘Deep Focus’, are frankly boring. They demonstrate a huge increase in skill but they all just look like movie-stills. These are the paintings I have always seen in local galleries next to James McQueen’s prints with the phrase “Shit Happens” on the cover of a Penguin classic. Like much of the contemporary art that is sold in galleries and not really notable enough to be bought by a museum, Dylan’s art seems to be nothing other than a name and the implication of an ‘edgy’ subculture that bored old people can buy. What happened to rock? What happened to the feeling? I can’t help but feel a little cynical when I realise this lines-up with Dylan selling his entire song catalogue to Universal Music, essentially giving up his ground-breaking sound and powerful protest songs to a huge corporation to use as they please. 

In my eyes, Dylan’s visual art has managed to render the plasticity of commercialisation that has tainted not just the contemporary art scene but also rock music as a whole. During this era of AI slop art which is often technically ‘perfect’ but emotionally dead there is something to be praised about the raw and distinctly human feeling of Dylan’s earlier works, art that you can look at and say: now that’s rock and roll! 

Images: Bob Dylan via Wikipedia, last two sourced from bobdylanart.com