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Two new things I learned today – That Bob Dylan is a painter and that there’s a new gallery called Wall to Wall within The Home Quarter furniture/lifestyle store on Hanover st.
There is a website coming soon at www.walltowallgallery.co.uk and they plan to have Meet the Artists sessions soon (don’t think Bob will be one of those though)
Here’s the PR…
Following the opening of the beautiful new Wall to Wall Gallery in The Home Quarter in 2010, the gallery is delighted to announce a unique and prestigious one-month exhibition from the musically and artistically gifted legend, Bob Dylan.
Opening from 15th April 2011, the exhibition will feature signed limited edition graphics from The Drawn Blank Series – a collection of drawings Dylan created whilst on the road from 1989 to 1992. While Bob Dylan has been a committed visual artist for more than four decades, The Drawn Blank Series has cast a vibrant new light on the singular creativity of one of the world’s most important and influential cultural figures.
As Marisha Pessl wrote in the New York Times, “In Bob Dylan’s extraordinary collection of paintings, 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 and paint….’ Yet again and again, he reflects life back to us with a truth and simplicity that defy words.
“His brush strokes are like his voice, straightforward, rough, occasionally fragile, but always intent on illustrating the treads of human experience. Seemingly unworried about how something looks, he’s not after artistic perfection but something larger, a moment, a feeling. The effect is enthralling.”
These expressive works capture Dylan’s chance encounters and uniquely combine the everyday with the extraordinary and the intimate, personal moments in Dylan’s time. This is achieved through his portraits, interiors, landscapes, still life, nudes and street scenes.
According to Dylan: “I… was just drawing whatever I felt like drawing, whenever I felt like doing it. The idea was always to do it without affection or self-reference, to provide some kind of panoramic view of the world as I was seeing it.”
The Fauves first used non representational colour to convey different sensations – a technique that was potently applied by Warhol during Dylan’s musical ascendency in the 1960s. Dylan’s Warhol-esque touches are now powerfully brought together in this generation of paintings – with richer tones, evocative shades and a depth that brings a great resonance and passion to his work.
Dylan’s decision to create several versions of the same image, using different colours and tones takes the viewer on a fascinating journey. This choice and skill in applying different colour arrangements to the same original drawing enables Dylan to express multiple perceptions of a single idea – hereby creating evolving works of art that engender and draw a wide spectrum of emotion and response from the viewer. The first in the Train Tracks Portfolio, depicts a blood red sky as seeps to the ground, the second turns to dramatic shades of Fauvist green, the third blue and then the fourth stark monotones, whilst the redolent Cassandra nude is the global ‘everywoman’ as her flesh transcends race and her passions journey with the backdrop, from a cool and aloof blue, to the passion of purple.
The collection will be shown in three graphic sizes with prices starting from £1,250. There are classic and enduring Portfolio and Box Sets of graphics as well as a beautiful hardback book (for £39.95) illustrating the extraordinary collection from Bob Dylan. Each edition shown in Wall to Wall is published in a limited number of no more than 295 copies worldwide, making them extremely exclusive to fans of his work. All are printed on Hahnemühle Museum Etching paper, certificated and personally signed by Dylan the artist.