Numerous musicians also make visual art, Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood for example, who is really a very decent painter and Rolf Harris, whose vast career has included recording 30 albums of music and painting a commissioned portrait of the Queen. Add this to the lexicon of Rock legends who formed bands at art school in the 60s and 70s, The Beatles of course, The Who, Roxy Music, arguably The Velvet Undergound, even Blondie, and you have a pretty established conceptual link.
Bob Dylan Limited Edition Prints came as a total surprise to most though. Those close to Bob Dylan the Folk Rock Legend perhaps knew of his penchant for making sketches while on his almost permanent Tour of the world, but these were really only for private consumption. It may have been assumed that there would really be no interest in Bob Dylan’s drawings of the interiors of various hotels, views of towns, of people in bars. A Traveller’s notes, quickly sketched. The sketches were published in a little book called Drawn Blank in 1992, which received no great attention, and fairly rapidly faded from view.
It was only when a curator from a museum in a relative backwater of the old East Germany found a copy of Drawn Blank at a flea market in New York that things really started moving. The curator was certain that drawings by perhaps the greatest singer songwriter of the latter 20th century, a man whose music continues to affect the lives of millions of people, might just be worthy of her museum’s walls. When Bob Dylan’s publicist wrote in response to her optimistic request for a show saying yes, the collection Drawn Blank was born. With some hitches along the way (please see Bob Dylan Original for more details) the show went ahead in East Germany, with the release of The Bob Dylan Limited Edition Print collection, Drawn Blank, soon afterwards, to great acclaim, and enormous worldwide interest.
It turns out Bob Dylan draws like a French impressionist, and has the sensibilities of an American expressionist. See Bob Dylan Original.