London, Nov. 5: The Telegraph has had a preview of an exhibition of Bob Dylan's paintings, which opened to the public today at the Halcyon Gallery in New Bond Street in the heart of London's West End.
(Photograph by William Claxton)
The gallery, which has promoted his paintings since 2008, had been planning this latest exhibition, called The Beaten Path, for the past three years but now finds itself the centre of attention because of Dylan's unanticipated Nobel Prize for Literature.
Dylan has been painting for the last 50 years. In fact, he has been painting since he started singing and touring in the early 1960s. He designed his own album cover in 1962 and has been doing it ever since.
Will Dylan really turn up in London?
"Do you know what? Anything is possible," responded Ada Crawshay Jones, marketing manager at the Halcyon Gallery, who facilitated a guided tour.
So how good is Dylan's art and is it worth collecting?
Some critics have been snooty about his work but, on the other hand, his paintings have been shown at some of Europe's top museums and galleries and, in London at the National Portrait Gallery.
According to the Halcyon Gallery, "The Beaten Path captures iconic images as Dylan travels the main routes and back roads of America. From the shiny lights of motel signs against a backdrop of bright blue sky in Florida Country to a quiet view onto a dark parking lot on a Night from a Hotel Window, the iconography invites the viewer to accompany Dylan on his travels as he criss-crosses the USA through the back streets, alleys and country roads."
To this reporter, one or two paintings were reminiscent of the landscape in Hitchcock's Psycho.
Dylan himself has written in a preface to the exhibition catalogue that he chose to ignore corporate North America: "The common theme of these works (is) having something to do with the American landscape, how you see it while crisscrossing the land and seeing it for what it's worth. Staying out of the mainstream and travelling the back roads, freeborn style."
Despite his reputation for being elusive, Dylan had not been difficult with the gallery.
Bob Dylan’s paintings, in water colours and acrylics, depict images of American landscape and urban milieu, the kind he got a glimpse of while touring. The iron installation is a product of his childhood hobby, that of “putting iron on iron”, at Hibbing, a mining town of Minnesota. All these have been included in an exhibition of his works at the Halcyon Gallery in New Bond Street, London.
Pictures by Amit Roy
"Not at all," said Ada. "He has been heavily involved in the curation of the exhibition. This is a brand new body of work that has been painted over the last two years."
Dylan took his art seriously, she emphasised. "He has been painting and creating drawings since his very first tour - it has been a passion of his from day one. So it is a new hobby. No one knows America as well as Dylan, I'd say. He had the never ending tour, so he has been travelling through America since almost the beginning of time."
She explained: "This exhibition is what Dylan sees from his tour bus - fleeting snapshots, looking out of the window, things passing."
Dylan likes working with iron and welding bits and pieces to make metal gates (the Clintons have one at home).
Ada pointed out that as a boy, Dylan grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, which was at the heart of iron ore country.
"His studio is full of bric-a-brac and iron works that he has collected," said Ada. "We have one of his iron gates in this exhibition."
