Bob Dylan's Point Blank Series

Bob Dylan’s new paintings were drawn fast, maybe from memory, maybe from life, probably a bit of both, but there is no way to be sure. The drawing or composing of them was in any case just part of the process. For the drawings to be remade as paintings each image, originally done in pencil on paper as a ‘quick study’, had to be scanned and reprinted so that it could then be elaborated on using acrylic paints. In this way every drawing survived but also became something else, another version of itself bodied forth in colour, amplified, given a different kind of vividness and maybe solidity.

Take Man on Stairs, for example. The original drawing has a gothic horror feel to it, with maybe even a hint of Piranesi’s prisons, while the man on the stairs looks hesitant, lost, a bit of a stumbler. The painting seems warmer, hopeful, with perhaps a trace element of religious symbolism, in that the man walking up the stairs looks as though he is full of anticipation, as if ascending into the light. Dylan shows us the same image twice, but the tones and inflections and the rhythms and the colours are so changed from the drawing to the painting that they become almost like opposites of each other. The contrasts are not always so extreme, but they are always pronounced.

Each image is being treated like a song, not a static thing but something that changes each time it is gone over, or re-enacted. The painting is a performance of something that has already been invented. So by implication it also represents just one solution to what the image could be. Like many painters before him, Dylan takes the same subject matter and represents it in different ways – not unlike the way Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire or the way Monet painted water lilies. The work exists as themes, but it is only ever experienced as variations.

The subjects depicted are extremely varied: some trucks in a yard, a man reading, an assortment of pots and pans, a pair of binoculars on a table, a key, an expanse of railroad tracks, a Scotch tape dispenser. The artist’s eye might seem to resemble a roving camera, restlessly scanning the world and occasionally, suddenly, honing in on a particular detail or person, as if to suggest that it (or they) have a particular part to play in a movie, the script and storyline of which have been implied but not overtly stated.

In fact, Dylan worked with three different writers who were shown the original drawings and invited to create literary sketches to accompany them. So Boxing Girl became the daughter of a violent father and alcoholic mother, taking out her rage on a succession of opponents in the ring; Flower Power, an image of an orchid in a pot, became part of the reverie of a nature lover listening to Bruckner’s symphony in D major while reading issues of National Geographic and dreaming of the immensity of the world; while This Diamond Ring became a weird talisman with a bizarrely colourful history, having been ‘vomited up by a Canadian poet during an Ayahuasca ceremony in Peru’ before being acquired by a crocodile hunter ‘who disappeared upriver in Florida during an expedition’.

In different ways, these elaborations demonstrate just how deeply language can transform an image in the imagination. John Berger made the point well in his study of art and perception, Ways of Seeing, in which he reproduced the same painting twice in succession, first without a caption and then with one: the painting was Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, which seems innocent enough seen as that alone, but add the caption telling us that ‘this is the last picture Van Gogh painted’, and it suddenly seems a far darker thing.

The pictures in Point Blank are not closed down by the texts that have been written about them. In a way, they reflect what Dylan himself might do as a songwriter. It may be wondered if the whole series of paintings comprising the Point Blank series is another glimpse at his creative process: start with a person who catches your attention (maybe a woman who has had too much to drink) or something that strikes you (some battered crocodile boots) and begin to work something up from that.

Make a story from such people and such things, write it up, give it a certain poetry, set it to music, invite others to help you perform it, and before you know it the magic has happened and Shakespeare is in the alley. These 97 pictures show us, 97 times, how that process might begin, and maybe they invite us to complete it in our own imaginations. They are like experiments in alchemy waiting to happen.