Bob Dylan

In the late 50s, Bob Dylan read On the Road (first published in 1957) by Jack Kerouac, a novel that celebrates and romanticises the feeling of cutting ties with the past and the liberating possibilities of exploration. In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, he explains that the book had been ‘like a Bible’ to him. In 1960, he left his hometown in Minnesota and set off for New York. With a career spanning over six decades, Dylan has established himself as one of the most influential cultural figures of all time. His music has transcended generations and national borders. Consequently, so much of his life has been spent on the road, touring around the world.

Travel is inextricably woven into Dylan’s reality and his art. His lyrics frequently express a yearning for the freedom of exploration, and similar themes can be found in his visual art. Dylan’s canvases are vast windows into the full spectrum of America. Through paths, rivers and roads he invites the viewer to explore. Our eye is led down these vast horizons, seen from low perspectives that place the viewer within the scene, taking in the view from the ground.

Many of Dylan’s landscapes almost resonate with the themes in Kerouac’s American classic. The novel takes the viewer away across the full expanse of America, observing it from the window of a car that blazes across the motorway with a speed that is reinforced by the fast-paced rhythm of Kerouac’s prose. Dylan’s landscape, Shadow Mountain, clearly exemplifies the affinities that exist between Kerouac’s writing and Dylan’s art. The viewer looks up to the pale blue mountains as if seen from the perspective of a car. The application of loose brush strokes renders the scene with a dynamic quality, conveying the feeling that we do not look at a static scene but instead one that we are moving through as a lived experience.

Shadow Mountain currently hangs in the exhibition Songs of the Open Road at Halcyon Gallery’s flagship space, 148 New Bond Street, alongside four other new landscapes by Bob Dylan, all created this year. These paintings demonstrate the artist's wide range of subject matter, from the drawings made while on tour in Drawn Blank, to the illustrated lyrics of Mondo Scripto to back alleys and dirt roads of The Beaten Path to captured movie stills of Deep Focus. 

This emphasis on nature in combination with loose, broken brushwork recalls Impressionism, a 19th-century artistic movement that certainly influenced Dylan. Painters such as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir represented the world that they saw by applying colour to the canvas, unmixed, so that each colour could sing independently, evoking the vibrancy of the natural world while highlighting complex, momentary atmospheric effects. Trees at Dawn and Daybreak are two paintings by Dylan from which significant parallels can be drawn with Impressionist methods of representation. Through these works, strokes of white, yellow and red are unmixed on the canvas. This technique, first pioneered by the Impressionists, lends a vibrancy to his work and imbues it with a luminosity that captures the vivid atmospheric effects of sunrise.

These new landscapes are emblematic of Dylan’s personal journey, his profound connection to the rich tapestry of American literature, and inspiration of Impressionist techniques. They reveal an artist whose oeuvre is in perpetual evolution; while simultaneously continuing the narrative he has woven throughout his life. His creations remain rooted in the same artistic vein that has always infused his diverse body of work. These present paintings evoke the same sense of yearning for the open road that has resonated in his music since the early 1960s.

If you are interested in adding Bob Dylan to your collection, speak to one of our art consultants now - email us at info@halcyongallery.com