It may have taken Bob Dylan more than a week to acknowledge his Nobel Prize for literature, but London’s Halcyon Gallery only had to ask him to paint American landscapes for “The Beaten Path” exhibition once.
In the essay “Why Bob Dylan Paints” for Vanity Fair, Dylan explains how a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of crowd behavior at a Chicago Stadium gig in 1974 with The Band seemed to give him clarity for this set of paintings.
Saying his early shows with The Band in 1966 caused “disruption and turmoil,” there was no way to know what would happen when they were together onstage again.
Dylan writes, “At the end of the concert we had played over 25 or 30 songs and we were standing on the stage looking out.
The audience was in semi-darkness. All of a sudden, somebody lit a match. And then somebody else lit another match. In short time, there were areas of the arena that were engulfed in matches.
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Within seconds after that, it looked like the whole arena was in flames and that all the people in the arena had struck matches and were going to burn the place down.”
What Dylan and The Band believed to be disapproval that would take all of Chicago Stadium down in flames was actually appreciation. There, Dylan was reminded appearances can be deceiving.
“For this series of paintings, the idea was to create pictures that would not be misinterpreted or misunderstood by me or anybody else,” he writes after recounting what almost led to Dylan and The Band running for the emergency exits in Chicago.
Dylan’s landscapes include San Francisco’s Chinatown, a hot dog stand in Coney Island, a side show in Alabama, and other traditionally American subject matter.
Using film photography, watercolors and acrylics, Dylan worked to strip these places of any pop culture or consumer culture packaging, instead focusing on his subject matter for what it actually is and not what alternate reality or fantasy it could live in.
Much like the flames before him in Chicago over 30 years ago.
“Bob Dylan, The Beaten Path” is on display at London’s Halcyon Gallery from Nov. 5-Dec. 11.
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