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Bob Dylan paintings at the Lightbox
The Lightbox museum and gallery in Woking has been chosen to launch a tour of art by legendary musician Bob Dylan.
The Drawn Blank series, a collection of more than 60 of his paintings, will open at The Lightbox on Tuesday November 25 and run until the new year.
The works are based on drawn studies made while Dylan was on tour between 1989 and 1992 and express his interest in the traditions of American and European art in the 20th century.
The Woking gallery and museum was selected as the launch for the public tour on the strength of winning the UK's largest arts award, The Art Fund Prize 2008, which has put it in a strong position for attracting major international interest from the art and exhibitions world.
Lightbox director Marilyn Scott said: "This is a fantastic result for the Lightbox.
"We are incredibly excited to have the opportunity to show this unique and extraordinary collection of paintings which until now has only been seen in Germany and in London at the Halycon Gallery."
According to his autobiography, Dylan started drawing in 1961 and his work reflects his life as a musician on tour, chronicling his journeys between city and town and more rural landscapes.
At the centre of the exhibition is the series of paintings called Train Tracks which Mrs Scott said is particularly relevant for Woking in the light of the historical importance of the railway to the development of the commuter town.
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Sold hundreds of millions of records, played to millions, but as a painter, he merits only 1 room in Woking. I say merits, because if he weren’t Bob Dylan, this lot of sub-Van Gogh impressionist daubs would not have got that far. There must be thousands of accomplished amateurs who could knock up this sort of stuff; most do it as a hobby, for relaxation, which indeed is why Dylan paints. To Dylan’s credit, he took considerable persuasion to exhibit publicly, aware of his limitations. But he does have a style, a consistent determination to avoid straight or parallel lines, a general set of colours he works with, and a composition which looks like a photograph taken at an insufficiently wide angle. Pleasant to look at.
I’m desperate to like the Light Box in Woking. It’s a lovely looking building, startling architecture which has really used natural light very well. I can imagine, 10 yrs ago when it was made clear that local govt had a shedload of taxpayers cash delivered and no-one was going to make much of a fuss how it was spent, the good councillors/managers of Woking decided that a town of Woking’s calibre deserved an art gallery, or that councillors/managers of their calibre and self-importance deserved to be councillors/managers of a town with an art gallery. So, some eye-watering sum was spent, before anyone realised that they had no art to put in it. When I 1st visited, I was appalled that not only was there very little art, but the actually space allocated for showing art was minimal, far less than has been allocated for staff parking spaces; the Dylan exhibition, for example, is all in a single room about 20’ x 40’. There’s a room dedicated to Woking history (as if the recently built “Surrey History Centre” just up the road couldn’t have housed this). There are a number of function rooms which are available for hire, but presumably mainly, for self-important councillors/managers to preen and say, what a marvellous building we’ve provided to the town of Woking. If anything illustrates the public sector malaise of the last 10 years, it is that the council has viewed as thoroughly equitable and deserved this absurd division of space between themselves and the public who paid for it. Nice looking building, but I just become enraged every time I see it. The gallery itself did not have the wit to sell postcards of its exhibition (except in boxes of 10); this is pretty basic stuff.