Although internationally known as a singer and songwriter, Bob Dylan is also an author, film director, actor, disc jockey and visual artist. Dylan dates his origins as a visual artist to the early 1960s when a few drawings reached the public gaze on such album covers as Music from Big Pink (1968). A book of 92 drawings titled Drawn Blank were published in 1994, and exhibitions of reworked versions of these images were mounted at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in Germany in 2007 and the following year at Halcyon Gallery in London.
Now in his ninth decade, Dylan remains restlessly creative. His sculptures reveal the artist’s lifelong fascination with welding and metalwork. The major exhibition The Beaten Path opened in 2016 and marked an extraordinary turning point in Dylan’s visual art career. Jonathan Jones, art critic at the Guardian, observed ‘A real artist made these drawings and paintings. Their integrity is compelling. They demand to be looked at, for their awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of being alive. These are the pictures of a true poet.’
