Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series

by Bob Dylan, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Frank Zöllner

The visual arts have always played a significant role in Bob Dylan's worldview, and drawing and painting served as an outlet for his huge creative energy. Exquisitely reproduced, these intensely colored works are variations of sketches Bob Dylan completed while touring America, Europe and Asia, revealing a new facet of the artist.

Bob Dylan's watercolors and gouache recreate scenes of everyday life in riotous color: hotel room and apartment interiors; land- and cityscapes; views of sidewalk cafes, train tracks and wandering rivers. this beautiful collection, which reveals yet another dimension of Bob Dylan's poetic vision, will be treasured by all who respond to his extraordinary talent.

Genres: Art, Music, Nonfiction

287 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 2007

About the author

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, poet, and, of late, disc jockey who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. A number of his songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems of the anti-war and civil rights movements. His most recent studio album, Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006, entered the U.S. album charts at #1, making him, at age sixty five, the oldest living person to top those charts.

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature (2016).

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some notes on Dylan’s Drawn Blank Series.

I prefer this series to the Brazil Series.

I tended to prefer the sketches to the paintings.

These paintings often suggest the perspective of someone on the Never Ending Tour. There are lots of hotel rooms and views from hotel rooms, lots of bars and people in bars, and also paintings of back alleys. This view of America is not one I recognize from TV or from advertisements, but rather from when I drove across the USA, often on the Interstate. One finishes that drive with memories of a cluttery, consumerist, shallow, too hot and dry America. It's more real than an advertisement, but less exuberant, which might be one meaning of "blank" alluded to in the title.

Many of the people featured are drawn to emphasize how different real people are from what we see in film and on TV (another "blank"). The people Dylan sees (and that I see when I walk around or look in a mirror) are fat, frumpy, and oddly bulky.

-Some of the people, like "Society Woman" (with her blank eyes and her gnashing teeth smile), look psychopathic. Other portraits look like soulless (blank?) bodies to me, suggesting that it is the artist who sees them without looking to see a person inside.

-The named portraits are often kinder.

In looking at these paintings, in going to Dylan’s shows, and in reading Dylan’s music, I’ve often wondered if I would want to meet him. Although Dylan is one of my heroes, I tend to think that I’d rather not.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dylan has been known to reject attempts to draw links between his songs and his pictures (and then produced Mondo Scripto of course); here there is one obvious connection in the multiplicity of versions of each image, some of them minor variations (like the two versions of Motel Pool numbered 23.1 and 23.3), others producing radically different effects (Man on a Bridge, Dallas Hotel Room, Rooftop Bar, Sunburned).
Dylan's draughtsmanship is right up there with mine, but his experiments with colour (colouring in) are often pleasing. And in fact even his drawing, though beyond primitive, does have a style, and one that again it's easy to think of as Dylanesque in more than the tautologically true sense. It's expressive yet opaque, or vice versa. It's tempting to compare his line to his voice, but I'll leave that to you.
Clearly his approach to art production owes a big debt to Warhol, though I'd like to think Bob has a closer involvement in the creation of his multiples. Anyway, I like it.

[Jesse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not groundbreaking art. Dylan freaks might find value in seeing how he does variations in tone & narrative, or how color turns his work from primitive Woody Guthrie doodles to more Van Gogh-y stuff. However, the presentation is poorly annotated, the editors fail to reproduce Dylan's introduction to the untouched sketches (published in '94, apparently), and the many of the prints are too small. Dorks only.

[David Allen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The portraits are quite nice, some of the sketches are of interest and many aren't much more than doodles; the varied color interpretations range from worthwhile to worthless; the commentary is mostly useless. Of marginal interest even to confirmed Dylan heads. At least this cost me only $40.

[Jacque Bona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very thought provoking. He does a nice job interpreting life through his own vision. Another peek into Bob Dylan's world I enjoyed.