Artist of the day: Artist of the day, February 12, Bob Dylan

Monday, February 12, 2018

Artist of the day, February 12, Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (Robert Allen Zimmerman), (1941, Duluth, Minnesota) is an American singer-songwriter, author, and painter, who has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for more than five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became a reluctant "voice of a generation" with songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" that became anthems for the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war movement. In 1965, he controversially abandoned his early fan-base in the American folk music revival, recording a six-minute single, "Like a Rolling Stone", which enlarged the scope of popular music.

Since 1994, Dylan has published seven books of drawings and paintings, and his work has been exhibited in major art galleries. Although internationally known as a singer and songwriter, Bob Dylan is also an author, film director, actor, disc jockey and visual artist. One of the most influential and, at times, controversial figures in the music of the past five decades, he has sold over 110 million records around the world and since 1988 has played around 100 shows a year in the ‘Never-Ending Tour’. He paints mostly from life: ‘I’m pretty much interested in people, histories, myth, and portraits; people of all stripes’

The most celebrated singer-songwriter of our time, Bob Dylan’s visual art is marked by the same constant drive for renewal that characterizes his legendary music. Although he has been making art since the 1960s, his work was not publicly exhibited until 2007 when an exhibition of “The Drawn Blank Series” was held in Chemnitz, Germany, followed by “The Brazil Series” at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, in 2010–11. He often draws and paints while on tour, and his motifs bear corresponding impressions of different environments and people. A keen observer, Dylan is inspired by everyday phenomena in such a way that they appear fresh, new, and mysterious. He combines a wide range of popular styles, the sources of which he has reshaped to produce new conflations of image and meaning. His work provides a glimpse of an artistic process that is equally maverick and elusive.

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