While touring America, Europe and Asia between 1989 and 1992, Bob Dylan painted a collection of sketches depicting fleeting images of life on the road: portraits, landmarks, quiet corners of unknown places. Those works formed the Drawn Blank series.

Dylan himself said: “I just drew whatever I wanted to draw, whenever I felt like it. The idea was always to do it without emotion or self-referentiality, to provide some sort of bird’s-eye view of the world as I saw it at the time.”

Another section of paintings followed, named “The Beaten Path” – an unfolding portrait of the American landscape. Through sketches, watercolors and acrylics, Dylan designs a visual journey across the United States, finding beauty in the neglected sites that form the backdrop of everyday life for most US citizens. His aim of depicting the American landscape as “as you see it when you cross the earth and see it for what it’s worth,” is fully realized.

A natural progression from The Beaten Path’s previous and ongoing series, Deep Focus tackles figures rather than landscapes using source material from films to present compelling images that exude documentary honesty and the camera’s ability to manipulate reality. Dylan selected scenes from films and transformed them into paintings, another expression of his acute ability to define a moment in time and with these works further highlighting his multifaceted creative personality.

In addition to being one of the most iconic musicians of the modern era, Dylan is a painter, sculptor, director and a best-selling author. He has been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, the Pulitzer Prize, Sweden’s Polar Music Prize and the French Officer de la Legion d’honneur. He has won an Oscar and eleven Grammy Awards. In 2016 Dylan became the first singer-songwriter to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and in 2019, his first comprehensive solo exhibition opened at the Shanghai Museum of Modern Art, Retrospectrum. It was visited by over 100,000 visitors in the first 3 months, which established him as one of the most important contemporary visual artists.

Photos Courtesy of www.bobdylanart.com