Bob Dylan returns with a surprising new release

In 2022, when Bob Dylan was performing across the United States and Europe, he was also quietly making art, sketching landscapes, portraits and still lifes.

In November, Simon & Schuster will publish those drawings and others in an oversize art book, Point Blank (Quick Studies). The nearly 100 black-and-white drawings were created in 2021 and 2022 and will be paired with prose vignettes by writers Lucy Sante and Jackie Hamilton, and producer Eddie Gorodetsky, who worked with Dylan on his radio show and his 2022 book The Philosophy of Modern Song.

Bob Dylan is best known as a musician but his upcoming book and an exhibition in London offer an insight into his work as a visual artist. Credit: AP

Many of the drawings depict everyday objects and scenes: a roll of Scotch tape, a karaoke singer, a pair of roller skaters, a suit of armor, a suspension bridge.

“There’s a melancholy to them which is quite beautiful, but it’s not without a hopefulness and humour,” said Sean Manning, Simon & Schuster’s vice president and publisher.

For decades, Dylan kept his artwork private; he didn’t display it publicly until about 2007. Since then, he’s had exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, including in New York, London and Shanghai, and has released other art books, including The Drawn Blank Series, which was published in 2008.

Roller Skaters is one of the Bob Dylan drawings included in Point Blank. Credit: Bob Dylan

Reviews have been mixed. “His attempts at being a visual artist have gone from bad to worse,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote about a 2012 exhibition of his paintings at Gagosian Gallery in New York. In a laudatory review in The Guardian of a 2016 show at the Halcyon Gallery in London, critic Jonathan Jones praised Dylan as more than just a dabbler: “This guy can look. His drawings are intricate, sincere, charged with curiosity.”

A current exhibit of Dylan’s art is on display through July 6 at the Halcyon Gallery. The collection, also titled Point Blank, features paintings based on drawings that are included in the forthcoming book.

To coincide with the release of Point Blank, Simon & Schuster is also releasing a newly recorded, unabridged audiobook of Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume I, narrated by actor Sean Penn. It runs to 10 hours – twice as long as the earlier version, also narrated by Penn.

Dylan’s fans have been eagerly anticipating the second volume of his memoir, but no release date has been set.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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