The question blowin' in the wind: can Dylan paint?

FOR generations, the debate about Bob Dylan has been: yes, but can he sing?

28SpringStreet gallery owner and artist Andrew Hmelnitsky holds one of Dylan's works. Picture: Lindsay Moller

FOR generations, the debate about Bob Dylan has been: yes, but can he sing?

Now there's a new question: yes, but can he paint?

An exhibition of Dylan's paintings went on display at the 28SpringStreet gallery in Sydney's Bondi Junction yesterday.

Dylan drew a series of sketches in pencil and charcoal while on tour between 1989 and 1992. Random House published the drawings in a book called Drawn Blank, but it sank without a trace in 1994.

In 2006, the curator of a small museum in Chemnitz, in what used to be East Germany, Ingrid Mossinger, found the book in New York, and called Dylan to ask if he'd like to finish the works, and display them.

Within days, Dylan called back.

Ms Mossinger last year told The Guardian: "I think he was just waiting to be asked, and no one had."

She chose 130 drawings, among them a woman with a broad back and a voluptuous bottom, spotted by Dylan as he was drinking in the Red Lion pub in Blackpool in 1992, for Dylan to complete in paint.

They've come to Sydney direct from London and New York where praise was, predictably lavish.

The New York Times said Dylan "reflects life back to us with a truth and simplicity that defy words.

"He's not after artistic perfection but something larger, a moment, a feeling.

"The effect is enthralling."

On the other hand, a London critic has said: "He has talent and that might develop ... with effort."

Dylanologists have looked for meaning in the works, saying, for example, that they "express what the Germans succinctly refer to as schwellenangst -- the fear of entering a place".

But, in an interview with London's The Times, Dylan said he was drawing "whatever I felt like drawing".

He did it "whenever I felt like doing it".

Told that the windows in the paintings suggested that Dylan saw himself as a perpetual observer of life, he said: "I put a window there. It just looks better to me that way."

The exhibition has been brought to Australia by artist and sculptor Andrew Hmelnitsky.

"I'm not a fanatic," he says of Dylan's music. "But he's got a great hand. Definitely, he can draw."

Which leaves just one question: yes, but can he sing?