I suppose I’m quite a Bob Dylan fan. I’ve got most of his albums and have seen him perform three times (in London), I’ve read half a dozen books about him and have three or four of the ever-expanding Bootleg series (27 box sets and counting).

I knew that Dylan had been a painter for almost as long as a singer and that the cover art of several of his numerous albums feature his own paintings, namely Self Portrait (1970) and Planet Waves (1974). But I was surprised, cutting along New Row towards Covent Garden a few weeks ago, to walk past the Castle Fine Art shop and see that the entire front window was showcasing art works from Dylan’s latest ‘collection’.

Castle Fine Arts specialises in representing a number of celebrity artists, including Dylan, Ronnie Wood and Johnny Depp. The Covent Garden branch is just one of three Castle Fine Art galleries in central London, and a total of 40 around the UK.

To see the Bobworks you had to go to the downstairs gallery, which was until recently dedicated to displaying and selling copies of this latest collection.

Installation view of ‘The Beaten Path’ by Bob Dylan at Castle Fine Art, Covent Garden

The works are a set of six limited edition prints of original paintings which are themselves part of the larger ‘The Beaten Path’ series and signed by the artist. As you can see, they are vivid and brightly coloured but at the same time pleasingly rough-and-ready depictions of iconic American scenes, namely the open road, motels and bars, the Golden Gate Bridge and more.

‘Terminal Bar’ by Bob Dylan courtesy of Bob Dylan/Halcyon Galleries

He’s come a long way since the (haunting) self portrait for ‘Self Portrait’ (which, according to an interview cited in the Wikipedia article, he knocked off in five minutes) or the quirky cover art for ‘Planet Waves’. The roughness, irregularity and weirdness of the latter was, for me, tied up with the ‘back to the roots’ and sometimes haunting feel of the music on that album (for example, Going, going gone, the traumatising Dirge, or the brilliantly ragged, troubled Wedding song).

Well, as you can see Dylan’s technique is quite massively more advanced than 50 years ago, in fact some of the works are staggeringly realistic, with an impressive creation of depth and perspective, as in the fog obscuring the top parts of the Golden Gate Bridge.

‘Golden Gate Bridge’ by Bob Dylan courtesy of Bob Dylan/Halcyon Galleries

Dylan himself is quoted as saying:

“The common theme of these works is how you see the American landscape while crisscrossing the land and seeing it for what it’s worth. Staying out of the mainstream and travelling the back roads, free born style.

“My idea was to keep things simple, only dealing with what is externally visible. These paintings are up-to-the-moment realism – archaic, most static, but quivering in appearance. They contradict the modern world.”

I’m not sure this is really true. The Golden Gate Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge are hardly ‘back roads’, they’re iconic images of the USA which feature in countless tourist brochures and glossy movies. The second paragraph is a slice of the impressionistic prose which he has written ever since those stream-of-consciousness early LP covers through to his first book of memoirs, Chronicles Volume 1 (2004), featuring the deployment of unexpected vocabulary (‘archaic’) etc. I don’t think it quite comes off here.

Also, the quote comes over as Dylan trying to hang on to his ragged, rebel, hobo image of himself, and this is in stark contrast with the works themselves, which are slickly packaged products. If the paintings are surprisingly bright and vivid, so too are the prices. A beautifully framed copy of one of these works will set you back a cool £2,950, the entire set in nice plain wood frames costs a tidy £14,950. You don’t need a weatherman to know that’s pretty pricey.

‘Omaha Rain’ by Bob Dylan courtesy of Bob Dylan/Halcyon Galleries

In the original display there were more than just 6 paintings on display here, there were at least as many again from other series, so maybe 15 or so to spend half an hour checking out, enjoying and comparing.

The books

In a way the biggest surprise to me wasn’t these vivid colourful paintings but the books, enormous heavy coffee table books devoted to all his previous series of works. Flicking through the pages of some of these very heavy, glossy hardback productions I began to realise that His Bobness’s output isn’t a minor hobby but the result of prodigious and sustained productivity for decades. There’s loads of these books containing hundreds of paintings, many of them astonishingly finished and evocative images of all aspects of Americana.

‘Pink Motel’ by Bob Dylan courtesy of Bob Dylan/Halcyon Galleries

None of the 6 foregrounded in this sale happen to feature human beings which I thought, at first, was a conscious choice, but in the books I saw that hundreds of others do, depicting quite stunningly realistic images of people in bars, clubs, the street and so on.

Thoughts

Having recovered from the surprise of realising that Dylan painted a) so well and b) so much, I settled down to mull them over. I think it’s pretty obvious that these artefacts are nice decorations for yuppies who fancy themselves as cool, maybe the perfect gift for the ageing finance exec who has a collection of expensive guitars in his music room.

Although much more consciously rough around the edges, they reminded me a bit of the paintings of Jack Vettriano, much looked-down on by artists and critics because they are so obviously shallow, superficial products designed to appeal to unsophisticated tastes. Dylan’s art, although coming from a different place and consciously lacking the smooth finish of the Scotsman’s paintings, is in its way even more showy, bright and supremely assimilable.

The way that they’re prints, nicely framed and ready to pop up on your wall, made me think of Ikea where they wouldn’t be out of place, bright and bold and completely unchallenging.

Thinking about it for the half hour it took to examine the paintings and leaf through the (big, heavy) books I realised I miss the quirkiness of the cover of Self Portrait – much more powerful if, admittedly, in a turn of the century proto-cubist sort of way – or of Planet Waves, which has a similar ‘primitive’, early Picasso vibe (the Picasso of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon).

Both of those feel, to me, genuinely weird and do have something uncannily ‘archaic’ about them, to use Dylan’s own word. By contrast, for me, the modern suite is impressive, slick and empty, with only occasional flickers of life, like a lot of Dylan’s later music.

Time marches on

Since I visited and wrote this review a few weeks ago the gallery has moved things around. The Bob Dylan display has been moved into the back gallery, and the downstairs space is now devoted to works by a clutch of celebrity artists: four paintings by Johnny Depp from his spooky Bunnyman series (accompanied by a video interview with Depp about the series’ origins and showing him at work actually creating them), an OK portrait of Mick Jagger by Ronnie Wood, one big work by James McQueen, and a single print in the corner by Andy Warhol.

But worry not: if you like the Dylan works I’ve described, you can see many more Dylan prints at the Halcyon Gallery in New Bond Street.

Last call

Despite all the art critics who make a living talking about art’s subversive, revolutionary purpose, a shop like this (or, in a different register, the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition) make it perfectly clear that art, like the music of Dylan or Jagger, although you can attribute to them any kind of meaning or emotion you care to, are ultimately about selling stuff, about shifting units.

Related links

• The Beaten Path by Bob Dylan continues at Castle Fine Art
• About Bob Dylan page at Castle Fine Art
• The full Bob Dylan portfolio at Castle Fine Art