dylan as painter

Check out, if you are interested these two:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7441708.stm

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/books/review/Pessl-t.ht

The first a D. interview where he talks mostly about his paintings.
The second is the nytimes review of the book with his paintings "The Drawn Blank Series".

I lent the Book to my sister's newspaper, so I don't have it at hand. It's a big, classy book with many paintings and some articles written by art critics . Someone with the last name Picasso signs one of them. The curator of the Cheimnitz Museum, which first exhibited his works, writes the Introduction and discusses at length his work. She is the one who has made most of the comments that D attacks viciously in his interview.

When I read the D. interview, I was bent laughing. D is simply INCORRIGIBLE. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. D is lashing it out, savagely ironic and disgusted everytime he refers to what the critics wrote about him and his work. This comes out only when you read the two things together, what the curator says and what D says. I guess that the Lady Curator was expecting D's eternal gratitude for her daring initiative to exhibit first his work. Little did she know.

Myself, I like D's work. He gets on my nerves when he hits the canvas with his little, broken, black lines which create nervous energy but also frustration and angst. I have a suspicion that he does that ,... big maybe here..., because he thinks he puts some kind of musical tempo and beat into the images. Whatever the reason, he makes me nervous.


What I noticed (and I did not spend a lot of time on the subject) are the following:

He is really and truly original. He does not copy and is not influenced by any other except himself. This feels like totally his own vision of the world.

There is a richness in his colours ( eg he does the same tree in many different versions of colours) and in his imagination which is wonderful. Very vivid, very LUSH scenes and a huge possibility of endless variations on one simple subject.

He does simple things in his paintings which are terribly smart. This is hard to explain without showing how. Like having one curve on one body and then another one on another, that creates some musical harmony.

He is VERY SENSUAL. That was a big surprise for me. But his women, wow!!!

He is VERY daring and original in the choice of his colours. And of his points of view.Never predictable. Always dares and wins.

He really notices the poetry in very,very simple things that surround us. He notices things that maybe we would not notice and he discovers the poetry in such scenes. Like the little stopover on the high way with some guys that look like truck drivers drinking and the lascivious woman resting on the balcony. One can imediately imagine this as a Bob song.

He loves the simple and the ordinary, a little fence in N. Orleans that he can see through his window for example. A little detail that he touches and it magically turns into a big Bethoven symphony through his touch..

He loves the road,....oh yeah.
he loves interiors too, very much so, the atmosphere, an armchair here, a lamp there and you get immediately inside this place, you inhabit it and you inhale it and it's full of style and romance.

Yes, I can categorically state that Bob is truly and really one of the last romantics left in the world.

I gather I like quite a lot about Bob's work. And please let me not get started on Co...OH< NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!!!

Marianna



Jim

Hoooooooooh! God, you do write fast Jim50! And you are so convincing, I am sure in a " past life" you were an orator practicing his art in the Greek Agora. You know how much prestige these chaps carry in my country. So I mean this as a great and deserved compliment of course.

You know I started looking at Bob's paintings with great sccepticism at first. But after some time, his work grew on me. Now, I am very fond of it. With paintings, it all happens in the mind, I believe, long past the moment you actually paint something or see and experience something. It's an internal process and it happens with time, in time, it germinates and grows independently of the actual experience of things and independently of the senses. I have talked about this with lots of artists. Painters, sculptors. You paint with your mind. You sculpt with your mind.You appreciate some paintings and works of art years after you see them. Every time I see the same Picass , I experience different things and appreciate different things, it never ceases to grow inside me.

When once I visited my son's class at the School of Fine Arts, his professor made them paint the same subject for days on end and just changed the music he was making them listen to. I watched this and I realised how much music has to do with painting. Many great artists saw painting and music as one, as you well know. Kandinski, Klee and so many others.

The fact that Dylan is a musician has a lot to do with his paintings, I think I can see his music and his poetry, his lyrics in his works sometimes and I sure look for them there. I don't see D as many-sided, I see one D, one unified self, that expresses itself as well as it can. I leave the many identities theories to the "I am not There" genius director, what's his name...

I don't search for great painters, or great talents, or great draughtmen...etc. I search for artists who have something important to say. Instead of many trivial and trite things to nonsay and just sell. I think that D is such a man and such an artist.

Our society creates many different selves and millions of false identities which represent just different markets for consumers. A unified, authentic self has not made an appearance this century or even in the past century very often.

I therefore disagree with you wholeheartedly, I am afraid. I dont pay any attention to how much money Shakespeare made or what the Elizabethan van Ronk thought of him and how Shakespeare, who must have been a nasty, cunning devil, treated him in the tavern. All I care about is "Kind Lear". He wrote it, I read it and I am happy.

This is what I think and unfortunately I dont know how this text machine operates so That I can save and then go back and read what I am saying at leisure, before sending. What can you do? as the Americans say.

Best wishes

Jim

Jim50
First of all I love your avatar
Second, I own one of those prints. I actually do believe he signed them. I am sure he didn't sign them all in one seating. If it were by any chance not signed by him, I think there could be a lawsuit involved for false advertisement especially for the price of the pieces.

MARIANNA WROTE:
He is really and truly original. He does not copy and is not influenced by any other except himself. This feels like totally his own vision of the world.

I DUNNO, MARIANNA. HIS DRAWINGS REMIND ME OF WOODY GUTHRIE TRYING TO IMITATE VAN GOGH. AND, THAT'S NOT A PUT DOWN. I LIKE BOB'S STUFF.

GEORGE (FROM A HOTEL BALCONY OVERLOOKING THE CARIBBEAN)

Don't be in such a hurry to judge and condemn before verification. I dropped by Halcyon Gallery for a quick look at D's paintings to see with my own eyes what was going on, because one can not talk about paintings without seeing them in reality, ever. I was impressed. Very. No relation to book photos. I almost lost my flight, caught it at the very last minute because I had to see them properly. A couple of houses down the street there was a Ronnie Wood exhibition. I just passed it as I ran and THAT was really bad.

marianna wrote: one can not talk about paintings without seeing them in reality, ever.

I don't agree with that. It always seems a lazy journalistic way of being confrontational: Did You See The Film/Hear The Song? If the answer's: NO, then the sneering can begin ....

Everyone has many opinions based on many things apart from Direct Personal Experience - I know that Sex and the City, the film, is trite, product-placement exploitative nonsense and I have not watched it - and I am correct.

Painting-wise, it's easy to look in a book of reproductions and recognise greatness or mediocrity.
I recognise that the Van Gogh self portrait in Kelvingrove Gallery in Glasgow is better to see there, but that's to do with something other than whether it's any good - like His Hand Touched This/It's So Flipping Old/This Came Across Europe, Ended Up Here ... lots of other impinging factors. And in a book it's a great picture even if the colours and depth are wrong. Because great art overcomes this and Bob Dylan's pictures do not.

Jim

[quote="marianna"]
I don't search for great painters, or great talents, or great draughtmen...etc. I search for artists who have something important to say. Instead of many trivial and trite things to nonsay and just sell. I think that D is such a man and such an artist.

quote]

I agree with you Jim. One does not need the direct experience to make quality judgements about art. But, painting is a visual art and it helps if you "see" the work. Then, I at least, always experience a BIG alteration in the degree of the aesthetic appreciation I derive, in the intensity of it. Some people can tell only by a single line if someone is a great artist. I can't so I need the experience more than others. So I did express myself badly, I can see that.

However, as it says in the quote, I did not claim that D is a great painter. I just said that he is a great artist who has something important to say. I also said that he is one of the last romantics. How many are there, left? How shall we all feel when the last ones go? Myself, I will feel terrible.

Before I left Athens last week, I put the question that we were discussing to my dear friend Billy the Kid, because I value his opinion a lot, as I value yours too. From the beginning what interested me was not to make a judgement about D as a painter, but to try to understand from this what is the role of an artist today. I liked B's answer so I will show it below ( with his permission of course):

.".. my views on the value of any given artist.

the auterist critics used to say the worst film of howard hawks was of much more value than the best of henry hathaway, and i agree. by the same token, the worst song of dylans is more valuable than the best song of any given lesser artist.

and so we come to this next step in our logic, which tells us that drawings by someone who is a major artist in another field are of more value than are better drawings by someone who is not a major artist in the visual arts.

therefor, dylan's work in the visual arts, while it may be substandard in certain critical judgments, is has a value that transcends any singular aesthetic, as it represents another facet of the artists world vision.

the film masked and anonymous is substandard in many ways, but as a work in the dylan canon it is like a film version of the basement tapes. tarantula is by no means a novel, but it is highway 61 in narrative prose, and thus has a strong value as part of the dylan canon.

was william blake a great artist? no, but his illustrations are so much a part of his poetry that the poetry would lessened without it.

so it is with dylan in the visiual arts. . his vision is so strong that the slightest work in a a field that is not his primary focus becomes an unmistakable abd neccessary addition to the overall life work.

ultimately, the work is all that remains of the artist ..although the artist is more than the sum of his work. if is through the dabblings in forms of which the artist is less skilled that we sometimes find immesuarable insights into the unique perceptions of a major artist such as dylan."

Billythekid