Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series

The visual arts have always played a significant role in Bob Dylan's worldview, and drawing and painting served as an outlet for his huge creative energy. Exquisitely reproduced, these intensely colored works are variations of sketches Bob Dylan completed while touring America, Europe and Asia, revealing a new facet of the artist. Bob Dylan's watercolors and gouaches recreate scenes of everyday life in riotous color: hotel room and apartment interiors; land- and cityscapes; views of sidewalk cafes, train tracks and wandering rivers.

This beautiful collection, which reveals yet another dimension of Bob Dylan's poetic vision, will be treasured by all who respond to his extraordinary talent.

"This volume, which accompanies an exhibition in Chemnitz, Germany, contains new versions of Bob Dylan's pencil and charcoal sketches originally published in a book called Drawn Blank; here they are reproduced along with color versions, digitally transferred to fine art paper and reworked in watercolor and gouache. In Drawn Blank, Dylan described his drawings as an effort to 'refocus a restless mind,' a statement that captures the atmosphere of the drawings,. They seem to be the work of a man who sees many new cities, hotel rooms and other people's houses. Color, however, brings very little to them, despite the inflated claims for their high artistic value made by the four contributing essayists. Jens Rosteck, a Dylan biographer, places him among a group of 'multi-talents' who range from Goethe to Jean Cocteau, but the comparisons run up against the indifferent quality of most of the 170 color reproductions. While Dylan's interior studies can be intriguing and psychologically fraught, his portraits and nudes seldom come off as more than earnest imitations of the Expressionist works he admires. Such judgments, however, may be beside the point for the 'Dylanologists,' as Rosteck describes them, to whom the book will appeal." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"In Bob Dylan's extraordinary collection of paintings, Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series, we are given insight into the expressive, unvarnished way this artist approaches the world and reminded he is that rare person who can move effortlessly between music, word, ink, paint, as if he's just futzing around with a few different instruments in the studio." Marisha Pessl, New York Times Book Review