Dylan's vivid portrayal of life on the road that was often a-changing

Published on Monday 2 February 2009 08:52

Bob Dylan: Drawn Blank City Art Centre

IN the last seven days, Edinburgh has been the stopping off place for two art exhibitions by aging rock icons: Ronnie Wood spent a week at The Dome on George Street while Saturday saw Bob Dylan's Drawn Blank series take centre stage at the City Art Centre.

While it's tempting to wonder whether this is the start of a trend of musicians swapping instruments for easels, the tradition isn't a new one. Goth rocker Marilyn Manson showed off his watercolours in 2002 – described by one reviewer as the work of a 'psychiatrist patient given materials to use as therapy' – while Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney and David Bowie have all picked up a paintbrush in their time.

Born in Duluth, Minnesota in May 1941, Bob Dylan is today one of the world's most popular singer/songwriters, with over 110 million record sales to his name. Dylan's artwork started to take shape while on tour between the years of 1989 and 1992, an effort to "refocus a restless mind".

Dylan returned to his drawings in 2007, making them into fully-fledged pieces of art by scanning the sketches into a computer, printing them onto deckle-edged paper and painting them in watercolour. This has now led to the most extensive collection of the man's paintings aired to date.

On arrival at the gallery, the expectant visitor is first met with a portrait of a seated Dylan in a checked suit. Entering the exhibition space, the sheer volume of paintings on display is impressive. The first picture on display is Man on a Bridge, its subject bearing a passing resemblance to a young Vincent van Gogh, though Dylan insists this is a coincidence.

His world comprised of dozens of buildings, places and faces, each one blurring into the next as he travelled from town to town, hotel room to hotel room, Dylan's initial sketches appear to be his chance to depict the mundane alongside the more interesting.

Carbondale Motel and Staircase portray the drabness and uniformity of hotel life, small corners of anonymous rooms rendered for posterity. The outside world is also represented in paintings such as Backyard and Sunflowers, the latter offering alternate versions of the same image, one with a deep blue sky, the other blood red: different moods require different colours.

Dylan is unafraid to take more than one shot at a painting, variants on a number of sketches present in the exhibition. Whether this shows unhappiness with the original or simply a desire to experiment is open to debate.

Overall, Drawn Blank is an assured and uninhibited glimpse into the private life of Bob Dylan that complements his music for the diehard fans while offering an insight into a life on the road for the uninitiated.