Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series [Hardcover]

Frank Zollner (Author), Ingrid Mossinger (Editor), Kerstin Dreschel (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 30, 2008 | ISBN-10: 3791339435 | ISBN-13: 978-3791339436 | Edition: First

The visual arts have always played a significatn 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 gouachse 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This volume, which accompanies an exhibition in Chemnitz, Germany, contains new versions of Bob Dylan's pencil and charcoal sketches originally published in a book called Drawn Blank; here they are reproduced along with color versions, digitally transferred to fine art paper and reworked in watercolor and gouache. In Drawn Blank, Dylan described his drawings as an effort to refocus a restless mind, a statement that captures the atmosphere of the drawings,. They seem to be the work of a man who sees many new cities, hotel rooms and other people's houses. Color, however, brings very little to them, despite the inflated claims for their high artistic value made by the four contributing essayists. Jens Rosteck, a Dylan biographer, places him among a group of multi-talents who range from Goethe to Jean Cocteau, but the comparisons run up against the indifferent quality of most of the 170 color reproductions. While Dylan's interior studies can be intriguing and psychologically fraught, his portraits and nudes seldom come off as more than earnest imitations of the Expressionist works he admires. Such judgments, however, may be beside the point for the Dylanologists, as Rosteck describes them, to whom the book will appeal. (Feb.)
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Review

In Bob Dylan s extraordinary collection of paintings, Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series, we are given insight into the expressive, unvarnished way this artist approaches the world and reminded he is that rare person who can move effortlessly between music, word, ink, paint, as if he s just futzing around with a few different instruments in the studio. Yet again and again, he reflects life back to us with a truth and simplicity that defy words. He shows us views from his hotel and backstage dressing room, a playground slide that caught his eye, a fat curtain in his room, an inquisitive young man named Nick Leblanc. He riffs with color across the same simple black-and-white sketches the way he plays songs in concert, sometimes making subtle changes, other times brutally overhauling them. His brush strokes are like his voice: straightforward, rough, occasionally fragile, but always intent on illustrating the treads of human experience. Seemingly unworried about how something looks, he s not after artistic perfection but something larger, a moment, a feeling. The effect is enthralling.
Dylan drew the moody black-and-white sketches while on tour between the years 1989 and 1992, and in 2007 turned some of these drawings into more than 200 paintings (170 reproduced here) by adding vibrant watercolors and gouaches, as well as titles like Feet and Cupid Doll. The naturalistic scenes record the world around him, observed between performances, and illustrate how his eye relentlessly pursues usually ignored people, buildings and common objects. He wrenches objects from the background an outdated TV, Venetian blinds, empty doorways and alleys and puts them center stage, unearthing a beauty in the bland.
In the crowded Rooftop Bar, no one but the artist notices the solitary woman staring off the balcony, her back to us, face unknown. And the lady waiting at the bar in Woman in Red Lion Pub would never have dreamt her broad back would become the electric-red subject of a painting. But in her slanting, voluptuous silhouette, her choice of dress and hat, Dylan points out her power and sturdy elegance, qualities she herself seems unaware of. Motel Pool features the kind of sad swimming hole that without hyper children wearing Floaties and screaming Marco! Polo! goes instantly stale. In one version it s a viciously sunny day, achy on the eyes, a saggy palm garnishing the patio like speared fruit hanging off the rim of a Mai Tai. Rendered in the plum colors of night, however, that same scene goes lush and secretive. You really wouldn t be surprised if, after brushing your teeth, you glanced outside and saw thieves by that pool conspiring to rob the main office, or maybe drunken lovers lurching past it, trying not to fall in.
And that is the best part of The Drawn Blank Series. There are the overt joys of Dylan s framing; he hacks off heads, shoulders and legs to home in on an expressive mouth, belly and three-fourths of an armchair. There s also his wonderfully gleeful perspective. His cities are built not on rock but on waterbed. Porches undulate toward us. Roads swell. Telephone poles, cars and guardrails all stretch toward Dylan like fans hopeful for a glimpse of him without his sunglasses. And his portraits are what passport photos should be: neat square headshots in strong colors and a few strokes revealing the person fundamentally. No, the true joys of Dylan s art derive from his bird s-eye view of our world, his understanding that a splash of purple will turn an ugly pool romantic. In the series Rose on a Hillside, he keeps the rose but restlessly changes the background a European town, a country cottage, a cluster of skyscrapers underscoring an interconnectedness that most of us, without the help of an artist, will never fully recognize. By MARISHA PESSL --The New York Times, June 1, 2008

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Prestel USA; First edition (March 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3791339435
• ISBN-13: 978-3791339436
• Product Dimensions: 12.1 x 9.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #602,557 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Have and See for Any Dylan Fan, April 6, 2008

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Velma Lashbrook "velma" (Eden Prairie, MN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series (Hardcover)

I was lucky enough to be in Germany during this exhibit and see it live. I also purchased the book there and have reviewed it several times. It includes the 170 works displayed at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz from October 2007 to March 2008 and three thoughtful essays that examine the works from several perspectives.

Ninety-two of the works were based on drawings published in 1994 as Drawn Blank. The museum director, Ingrid Mossinger, saw some of his drawings in the fall of 2006 at New York's Morgan Library (Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966) and was so captivated that she sought out a copy of the out-of-print book. In the book, Dylan said that one day he wanted to turn these into larger color paintings. So, she made contact and asked if he'd like to exhibit them.

Somehow Dylan managed to have the drawings transferred to deckle-edged paper and paint them using watercolor and goaches. The result was 322 paintings produced in just eight months - eight months during which he also was touring! From these, 170 were selected for the exhibit.

The works include interiors (dressing rooms, hotel rooms, etc.), cityscapes, landscapes, still lifes, and portraits - all captured in drawings he made between 1989 and 1992 as he toured the world performing. For many of the drawings, there are multiple versions using different colors that give you varied impressions of the scene. Much like Dylan's reinterpretations of his songs, these alternative versions reflect different ways of viewing the work.

The essays also provoke different ways of thinking about the works. Frank Zollner, focusing on the cityscapes as seen through a window or door, suggests that these works indicate a "certain restlessness, as the simulated gaze is that of a seeker." He draws on Chronicles to illustrate how Dylan thinks of art and how his words often create word pictures. In his view the pictures reflect an internal restlessness and a calm outside world.

Diane Widmaier Picasso (granddaughter of Pablo Picasso) traces the influence of Norman Raeben, one of Dylan's art teachers, as well as the Cubists and German Expressionists known as The Bridge. She notes that, "Just as the meaning of certain Dylan songs is sometimes obscure, since his texts seek not to have a fixed sense but rather to describe sentiments, to develop impressions beyond words (acquiring, like an abstract painting, meanings which vary with the mood of the recipient, yet still preserving a strong identity), so too his drawings can be similarly understood as they also reflect work which purposely refuses to be 'honed'."

Jens Rosteck, focusing on Dylan as a "multi-talent," examines the stylistic turns Dylan has taken with his music and his artistic endeavors into literature, film, and painting. He describes him as a rare "universal artist" capable of synthesizing diverse art genres, comparing his approach to da Vinci, Goethe, and others.

I was struck by a sense of detachment, even isolation or loneliness, as I viewed the exhibit. Dylan, the most sensitive and keen observer of life I know, once again in another medium, challenges me to think about how we live in this world.

If the exhibit ever comes near you, I encourage you to see it. In the meantime, this book is a wonderful catalogue of the works of this great artist.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bard Knows No Bounds, April 20, 2008

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Jimmy Mcgraw (Orange, California USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series (Hardcover)

Bob Dylan has been painting for decades and his abstract post-modern folk art style does him well. He shows us a seemingly unsophisticated yet highly evocative presence in his images with the door wide open to interpretation, like much of his poetic lyric. These often haunting pieces speak to me as the will not to you and vice versa - as well they should. Understand however, like his music, Dylan's art is an acquired taste and definitely not for everyone. I paid half the price the museums are charging for this book and I am sure have gotten twice the value from it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good quality, July 2, 2009

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Marc de Oliveira (Denmark) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series (Hardcover)

I was surprised at how good both paper and print quality is. Also, each drawing is showed in multible versions.

- Marc