Bob Dylan has been telling stories for 60 years. A new series of paintings that are intimate and a bit of a mystery have been captured by America's master lyricist.
The most comprehensive exhibition of the artist's work will be held in Miami on Tuesday. Forty new pieces by the writer will be shown for the first time.
The exhibition with more than 180 paintings, watercolors, drawings and ironwork sculptures will open the same week as Art Basel Miami Beach and will run through April 17 with no future stops announced yet. The tickets are booked by hourly slots.
Dylan's works from the 1960s include pencil sketches he made of his songs such as "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Like a Rolling Stone." His pieces are from private collections around the world and include sketches from the 1970s. In the past 15 years, the majority was created.
He was a writer, a composer, a singer, a performer and so on. The show was conceived by the artistic director of the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, who said that it is now that the audience sees also the last element. Dylan is able to express himself in many different ways.
A giant canvas of a sunset in Monument Valley on the Utah-Arizona line is an introduction to Dylan's newest works. John Ford used the same landscape in many of his films.
The painting of the reddish buttes is next to the room named "Deep Focus", which is named after a technique in cinematography where nothing is blurred out.
All the images are from films. Dylan said in one of the walls that they try to highlight the different predicaments that people find themselves in. The dreams and schemes are the same as the life that is coming at you.
The way Ashcan School artists depicted realistic images of people's hardship at the turn of the 20th century is how Dylan offers a lot of city life.
A jazz band plays in a colorful club in one of the paintings, while a gray-haired man counts cash in another. Two men are fighting in a boxing match while a woman is sitting alone at a bar drinking and smoking.
It will take some internet sleuthing to link the images of Dylan's latest works to specific movies.
Richard F. Thomas has written about Dylan. He said in an essay for the exhibit that he found online references tying one of the paintings to a scene in the film "The Loveless" where actor Willem Dafoe is a biker.
The 1971 movie ”Shaft" has an actor ordering street food in Times Square. Dylan uses cowboys, men in undershirts and barber's poles in his works.
The scenes of "Deep Focus" will keep Dylan scholars busy in the years to come, Thomas wrote.
The works in his new series have been shown in places such as the Halcyon Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Images of America are reflected in previous paintings. There are depictions of diners, motels, marquees, gas stations and railway tracks in his artwork.
The artistic director said it was almost like looking at a pamphlet of his memories.
Dylan has painted the corners of a New York City apartment, seemingly imitating the work ofVincent Van Gogh. He has done variations by drawing the same characters changing the color of the backdrop and their clothing, or just depicting them at a different time of the day, like Claude Monet's Rouen Cathedral series.
There are interactive displays for music fans in the exhibit. The 64 cards with words from the lyrics of the song that he flipped through in one of the earliest music videos ever made were framed and lined up in eight columns by eight rows.
It is not known if Dylan will come to visit.
Jordana Pomeroy, director of the museum, said it will be its first ticketed event since it opened. The Florida International University will be holding a symposium on Dylan inviting scholars to discuss his entire body of work.
Pomeroy said that Bob Dylan would be treated that way.
