Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait (Or Is It?)

Four years before releasing the album, a motorcycle crash sent Dylan into recluse in Woodstock. The fame-weary megastar spent his days jamming and drawing with The Band, while studying painting from Bruce Dorfman. This experimental period ignited a serious, lifelong engagement with oils. The Self Portrait cover reflects a new hobbyist having a bit of freewheeling fun.

Dylan’s elementary, folk-expressionist image does not appear to be a self-portrait. It is the face of a stranger, rendered wholly unremarkable and unrecognizable, comprised of saturated colors and slapdash brushstrokes. The image proved apt for the album. Self Portrait, naturally, is a confounding collection of mostly obscure covers. “What is this shit?” asked Rolling Stone critic Greil Marcus (as Dylan belts Wigwam with true glee).

But even this seemingly tossed-off drawing carries intrigue beneath the whimsy. Its goofy palette radiates a pure, childlike pleasure in painting, bordering on naïveté. Yet, the ambiguity of the figure invites a layer of subterranean blues: perhaps this is a portrait of Bob Dylan, hidden in plain sight behind the mask of a nondescript everyman. Who, or what, even is Bob Dylan?

Someone familiar only with Dylan’s music and persona might assume that the opacity of the Self Portrait project remained central to his paintings. Instead, its straightforwardness is its most foreshadowing element. While Dylan’s music ventures into dreams, surrealism, and misdirection, his steadily-improving canvases are surprisingly direct. Bob Dylan’s art communicates a lovely, unironic sincerity—for its subjects, and the act of painting itself—nearly absent in the rest of his… everything.

Dylan has described his Beaten Path landscapes as works that could not be “misinterpreted or misunderstood… having something to do with the American landscape—how you see it while crisscrossing the land and seeing it for what it’s worth.”

Bob Dylan, the Painter, is absent of persona. In totality, his oeuvre forms an accumulated self-portrait—more transparent, inviting, and earnest than his discography. No doubt, it’s the work of an observant, ever-curious artist, still thrilled by the world as he roves through it.

Author’s bio:

Michael Corvo is a London-based journalist and filmmaker covering art, sports, and culture.