It was a strangely moving experience seeing the work of Bob Dylan at the Halcyon Gallery in London’s New Bond Street.
Some 100 Dylan portraits, landscapes and still life paintings are on show at the elegant, subtly lit gallery from 9 May to 6 July 2025. A film covering Dylan’s life and career runs for about half an hour with rare clips shown for the first time. It is probably a good idea to see the paintings, watch the film and then go back for a second turn around the gallery.
I have seen Dylan perform on many occasions, at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, at Hammersmith Apollo and various venues in London. I was at the Barcelona football club on a spring night when Dylan’s plane from Madrid was delayed and he arrived two hours late at midnight.
No one complained. Everyone waited and it was astonishing that just about every Spanish fan knew the words and sang along into the early hours. I have one Spanish friend, Eloy Ferrer, who learned English listening to Bob Dylan and drops Dylanesque phrases into his conversation.
Dylan turned 84 on 24 May. The reason why my visit to the Halcyon Gallery was moving was because he is still on his Never Ending Tour, which began in 1988. He plays more than 100 gigs a year – yet finds time to write new songs, weld surrealist iron sculptures and create an ever-growing collection of exquisite water colour, acrylic and gouache paintings.
The show is titled Point Blank and is an extension of the earlier Drawn Blank. It some ways, it is an update, a continual refinement of a process that reshapes the tradition of the original drawings into something new.
Dylan Experiments
‘The originals were fragments of experimentation, passive adaptations of various scenes,’ Dylan writes in the cover notes. ‘These drawings are more deeply personal with an admiration for figures, places and things. The idea was not to observe the human condition, but to throw myself into it with great urgency.
‘As to the color schemes, the idea was to create living breathing entities that have emotional resonance, colors used as weapons and mood setters, a means of storytelling. Colors that distort, enhance or completely redefine reality, where even the shadows have a certain color. Take one color and emphasize the structure, truth and deception of it, whatever it might be. Blazing reds, blue as the echo of a dream. Muted browns, neon pink, funeral black, green as in love letters, where one color would emphasize melancholy, loneliness, tenderness, nostalgia etc. Color as a tool for reinvention. Usually these colors crash, dance and fight each other. By taking only one pigment and limiting yourself to it, using different shades, the picture will have a certain unity, symbolizing both peace and harmony.’
The show at the Halcyon Gallery is free entry and the paintings for sale start at £95,000 – about the price of a new Range Rover. One big difference is that a Range Rover’s value will go down year by year until it ends on the trash heap. A Dylan original will go up in value year by year until it ends up in MOMA – New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
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