Michael Glover in the New Statesman provides an articulate appreciation of the paintings by Bob Dylan which are contained in the new “Drawn Blank Series” book (these are the artworks which have recently been exhibited in Chemnitz, Germany).

Dylan and drawing go much further back than 1989. He tells us as much in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles. There, he rewinds the clock back to the early Sixties, when he first arrived in New York City from the chilling northern wilds of Hibbing, Minnesota. He not only tells us how he set about drawing, but also describes the kinds of things that pleased his eye then, and which - on the evidence of this book - still do. “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 and knives and pins, empty cigarette boxes. I’d lose track of time completely. An hour or two could go by and it would seem like only a minute. Not that I thought that I was any great drawer, but I did feel like I was putting an orderliness to the chaos around . . . In a strange way I noticed that it purified the experience of my eye, and I would make drawings of my own for years to come.”

[...]

The more recent paintings show him to be both cannily knowledgeable about painting and also wildly untutored, like any good Outsider artist might wish to be. Here is the boy who once stared at Woody Guthrie’s folksy illustrations to Bound for Glory; the same boy who absorbed the delicacy of Vermeer and let that perception drift into one of his greatest songs, “Visions of Johanna”. He moves from portrait to still-life, from landscape to cityscape. He crops, frames, fragments scenes with the scalpel of his eye.

Some of the best paintings - View from Two Windows, for example - are wayward, psychologically unnerving interiors, uninhabited rooms whose walls seem to be blowing outwards, and whose interiors seem to be yearning for the outdoors we can see framed in the windows or glimpse through grilles. There is much more unease about life indoors. When Dylan frames an outside scene from above, looks across a sea of rooftops, or sees a Bell Tower in Stockholm, there is a strange serenity about the looking eye.

We hear church bells tintinnabulating inside his skull - those very same church bells he wrote so warmly about in Chronicles and whose presence he memorialised so beautifully in a song called “Ring Them Bells”. It’s as if in order to relax into himself he needs to see things from afar, to capture the delightful buzz and weave of things without getting too close.

Sounds kinda good, doesn’t it?
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