Drawing : Bob Dylan and Drawing

 ‘Two Mothers’: O’Hooley & Tidow

It was Dylan that opened my mind many years ago to the possibility of making art out of experience. My teenager mind was listening to lyrics such as “Put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground”, (from ‘Ballard of a Thin Man’: Highway 61: Revisited), and as it did it visualised the words for me, I could clearly see that image of eyes sitting in a pocket and a nose pressed to the ground; it was a bit like being on an acid trip without having to take acid. Dylan’s voice was for me the voice of a contemporary poet, it was authentic in a way that ‘good’ singers never were for me. Perhaps I don’t have a very musical ear, but there was an edge to how he came across that said, “I mean this, like it or not, this is how I see the world.” 

One thing I learnt quite early on was that you shouldn’t try to analyze his songs. Friends who just didn’t get it, would say to me, “But what does it mean?” At the time I found it hard to explain that the meaning emerges as a feeling that you get from the interplay of lyrics, melody and his voice and is never fixed. His writing was I felt and still do, deliberately ambiguous and when embedded into his music the totality creates an overall atmosphere that I would as a teenager sink into and use to leave the world behind. I liked the fact that he could be surreal, a documentary maker, a poet that would write about a memory or a heartache, be outraged, be funny or perhaps be just trying to capture a feeling that he had. I felt I wanted to say stuff about all these things too, but I was tongue tied. Above all, I felt that his art (and I really did feel that what he was doing was art), was an expression of what it feels like to be a human being, trying to make sense of being alive and that it seemed to me was probably the most amazing thing that any human being could want to do. His records shaped me, my decision to be an artist, was very much made because I recognised something about the creative spirit in myself, something I first saw as I glimpsed myself through the lens of his words. 

I still listen with eager ears to any new recording that he might make, especially as we have both continued to make art as we have aged. I dread to hear that he might have died, as I fear that something of myself will die with him. He has in my mind, been a fellow traveller for over 60 years and I feel I understand why he still needs to tour, even though he is now in his 80s. Each time he plays those songs, he must find something new in them. The times that his work emerges into change and as they do, reception morphs; the song never remains the same. The older I get, I think I work harder. The more work I do, the more I realise there is more to say. I sense that he feels that too. Why stop, what else would you do? 

In Love minus Zero no Limit’, there is a line “With your mercury mouth in the missionary times”, an image I remember arose in my mind as I first heard it; a certain languid feeling, slid into a taste of metal and as it did it poisoned the image I had begun to draw in my mind, making it awkward and difficult to accept. Out of those moments of difficulty I began to get a handle on what this art stuff was about, it was making the familiar strange and it was hard work. As I got older and became ‘professional’, I continued to find images in his lyrics that would inspire me, especially when he left me surprised by how he put things. I have even made drawings in the past responding to what critics have said is Dylan’s worst song, ‘Wiggle, Wriggle’, from ‘Under a Red Sky; the line ”

Bob’s voice when young was the sound of my adolescent mind

So yes I’m still an adolescent in some ways, never getting over a first love. I remember that I used to watch snails in the garden when I was very small, I was fascinated, I wanted to know them and inhabit their world.  I still love snails and sometimes make images based on them, defenceless, without their shells. Something old and yet always new. Dylan was often accused of plagiarism but we are all plagiarists, if not we would never be able to communicate with each other, he takes Whitman’s line and re-digests it, acknowledging the fact that without Whitman there would be no Dylan, but without Dylan many of us, including myself, would never have read Whitman. We are all interconnected and inseparable from the world, something we should acknowledge or else we pretend that we are self determined isolationists, a self conceit bolstered by Capitalism, one that it seems to me, has led us to destroy the very ecosystems that we evolved within.  

Snail votive

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