Bob Dylan and Drawing

John Lennon

Of my two main adolescent musical influences John Lennon was the only one who I was aware of at the time that drew as well as made music, but it was Bob Dylan who opened my eyes, because his music was as much visual as verbal, as much about image as melody. I'm reminded of this because Bob Dylan was performing in Leeds this last week and at exactly the same time as he was on stage at the First Direct Arena, I was sitting in the City Varieties Theatre listening to O'Hooley & Tidow performing one of their last shows before formally ending their musical collaboration. At one point during the evening Heidi Tidow reminded us that Dylan was playing at the same time within a few hundred yards and thanked the audience for choosing to see them instead. Their song 'Two Mothers' is about the universal experience of having a mother and becoming one and as a lesbian couple they are very aware of situations where a child is given away to new mothers, who will now have to undertake the responsibility to sing lullabies. They are regarded as being part of a continuing folk tradition and are artists local to my West Yorkshire area; Dylan's example still encouraging others to get on stage and perform songs about their lives, even though they may be very different to the one that Dylan told us about. In many ways I felt that I was honouring my debt to Dylan by being there rather than going to see him, he doesn't need my support and if I had been to see him, it would have been more about being in the same room as him, than about hearing new stories from folk songs. His model, one he inherited from Woody Guthrie and many others, of making musical poetry out of the condition of the world, is hopefully one that will continue to be passed on, generation to generation.

 'Two Mothers': O'Hooley & Tidow

It was Dylan that opened my mind many years ago to the possibility of making art out of experience. My teenager mind was listening to lyrics such as "Put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground", (from 'Ballard of a Thin Man': Highway 61: Revisited), and as it did it visualised the words for me, I could clearly see that image of eyes sitting in a pocket and a nose pressed to the ground; it was a bit like being on an acid trip without having to take acid. Dylan's voice was for me the voice of a contemporary poet, it was authentic in a way that 'good' singers never were for me. Perhaps I don't have a very musical ear, but there was an edge to how he came across that said, "I mean this, like it or not, this is how I see the world." 

One thing I learnt quite early on was that you shouldn't try to analyze his songs. Friends who just didn't get it, would say to me, "But what does it mean?" At the time I found it hard to explain that the meaning emerges as a feeling that you get from the interplay of lyrics, melody and his voice and is never fixed. His writing was I felt and still do, deliberately ambiguous and when embedded into his music the totality creates an overall atmosphere that I would as a teenager sink into and use to leave the world behind. I liked the fact that he could be surreal, a documentary maker, a poet that would write about a memory or a heartache, be outraged, be funny or perhaps be just trying to capture a feeling that he had. I felt I wanted to say stuff about all these things too, but I was tongue tied. Above all, I felt that his art (and I really did feel that what he was doing was art), was an expression of what it feels like to be a human being, trying to make sense of being alive and that it seemed to me was probably the most amazing thing that any human being could want to do. His records shaped me, my decision to be an artist, was very much made because I recognised something about the creative spirit in myself, something I first saw as I glimpsed myself through the lens of his words. 

I still listen with eager ears to any new recording that he might make, especially as we have both continued to make art as we have aged. I dread to hear that he might have died, as I fear that something of myself will die with him. He has in my mind, been a fellow traveller for over 60 years and I feel I understand why he still needs to tour, even though he is now in his 80s. Each time he plays those songs, he must find something new in them. The times that his work emerges into change and as they do, reception morphs; the song never remains the same. The older I get, I think I work harder. The more work I do, the more I realise there is more to say. I sense that he feels that too. Why stop, what else would you do? 

In Love minus Zero no Limit', there is a line "With your mercury mouth in the missionary times", an image I remember arose in my mind as I first heard it; a certain languid feeling, slid into a taste of metal and as it did it poisoned the image I had begun to draw in my mind, making it awkward and difficult to accept. Out of those moments of difficulty I began to get a handle on what this art stuff was about, it was making the familiar strange and it was hard work. As I got older and became 'professional', I continued to find images in his lyrics that would inspire me, especially when he left me surprised by how he put things. I have even made drawings in the past responding to what critics have said is Dylan's worst song, 'Wiggle, Wriggle', from 'Under a Red Sky; the line ''Wiggle 'til you're high, wiggle 'til you're higher, Wiggle 'til you vomit fire', somehow hit me splat in my insides. I always did wriggle too much, my father said I suffered from St. Vitus Dance, I could never keep still and even now I find it difficult to sit down and watch a TV programme, without having to jerk my leg around, raise my arms or keep twisting my neck. It was that album that reminded me of the power of nursery rhymes and that sometimes you just had to go back to being a child if you wanted to renew yourself. I suspected Dylan had children around at the time, as I did and somehow I had to let their world into mine. 

Sketchbook page: Idea for fire/eye vomit

I'm still making images about vomiting up what's inside

Over the last few years we have seen more and more of Dylan's visual artwork. He sometimes couples his hand written out lyrics with his own illustrations, as in the image and text pairing below of 'Lay Lady Lay'. But these images although competent enough, are not going to open any new perceptual doors for me. I can see that he enjoys making them and everyone needs a way of releasing those images that stack up in your head but at the end of the day it is still his lyrics and the way he sings them that move me. 

Bob Dylan: Lay Lady Lay

Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself," contains the line, "I contain multitudes" and in 2020 Dylan revisited the idea himself, this time listing the people who crowd within him, it was as if they were all trying to get out. But as they do they climb over each other and a multi-headed creature begins to emerge; all push and shove, all masters but no leaders. We are all like that, underneath the thin skin of ourselves lives a congregation of others and this is perhaps Dylan's main legacy. He reminds us that we are all multiples of the many, that we inherit the forms of others and that there is no such thing as a truly unique individual. We take what we are given and we reweave the elements into new clothes. An attempt to get those clothes to fit perhaps being what many artists spend most of their time doing.

There is also something about Dylan's voice, that rough and worn thing that is not at all lovely, but which gives authenticity to the lyrics. It is for myself a sensibility akin to Cézanne's touch, sometimes crude, harsh and ugly and yet at other times exquisitely sensitive but always totally sincere. When at its best art is 'artless', it just is what it is. Style it seems to me is art's enemy, an infiltrator that snuck into the building via aesthetics. I was never a gifted draftsman, always a clumsy maker and it took me a long time to accept that, but once I did, I felt the work I began to do became more honest and less an attempt to cover up visual weakness with intellect. 

Bob's voice when young was the sound of my adolescent mind

So yes I'm still an adolescent in some ways, never getting over a first love. I remember that I used to watch snails in the garden when I was very small, I was fascinated, I wanted to know them and inhabit their world.  I still love snails and sometimes make images based on them, defenceless, without their shells. Something old and yet always new. Dylan was often accused of plagiarism but we are all plagiarists, if not we would never be able to communicate with each other, he takes Whitman's line and re-digests it, acknowledging the fact that without Whitman there would be no Dylan, but without Dylan many of us, including myself, would never have read Whitman. We are all interconnected and inseparable from the world, something we should acknowledge or else we pretend that we are self determined isolationists, a self conceit bolstered by Capitalism, one that it seems to me, has led us to destroy the very ecosystems that we evolved within.  

Snail votive

See also:

Drawing and wellbeing

Eye music

Andrew Lister Another artist who listened to Bob Dylan

A review of Pushing Paper A reminder to myself of how often Dylan comes to mind

Fine art?