POINT BLANK

What Dylan saw.

A companion to an exhibition of Dylan’s paintings at London’s Halcyon Gallery, this volume contains 100 of Dylan’s black-and-white drawings, created from 2021 to 2022, aptly described as quick studies. With texts by television writer and producer Eddie Gorodetsky and writers Jackie Hamilton and Lucy Sante, the images include portraits and landscapes, houses and interiors, cohering into a kind of visual diary. There are train tracks at a crossing, a tree house, cowboy boots, a bridge over the Seine, a street scene in Stockholm, and a man—“Max Moonbeam”—who, according to the accompanying text, transformed himself from a would-be actor to a weight lifter and classicist. Dylan drew a variety of performers: boxers, a wrestler, a piano player, a puppeteer, and a jazz guitar player, among others. The writers contribute vignettes for some images: “New Kid on the Block” shows a teenager, eager to impress, smoothing Brylcreem into his hair with intent: “His best friend was his comb,” the text reveals, “and he carried it in his back pocket.” Roller skaters embracing each other on the rink inspire a poignant backstory: the woman has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, yet five years later she and her companion are still skating, just not as often. Some texts read like prose poems. A skeleton key, for example, is “a simple piece of metal that unlocks hearts and souls, unlocks the chambers where mystery resides. It twists and turns, it’s the key to life’s hidden schemes.” A sketch of a nursery with a crib is accompanied by a story of wrenching tragedy. The pencil drawings themselves are energetic, capturing a moment, gesture, or scene with quick, loose lines.

A rocker’s drawings reflect an observant eye.