PEOPLE JUST FLOAT? A GUEST POST

A degree of symbiosis seems to be happening at present between this blog and John Baldwin's Desolation Row Information Service newsletter. The latter's reader Wiebke Ditmer has responded in detail to my earlier blogpost about Dylan's New Orleans Series of paintings  -  but on the newsletter rather than here. Meanwhile something I saw in a newsletter of a few days earlier prompted me to ask its contributor, John Morrison, if he would like to re-run it as a guest post on this blog. He agreed, re-wrote it slightly, and here it is:

  

On John Baldwin’s Desolation Row Information Service recently there was a reference to a painting by Theo Reijnders of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie playing their guitars in front of a cabin where Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker sat:

 © Theo Reijnders, 2005-7

The picture made me feel uneasy because Bob’s left foot, the weight-supporting one, seemed not to be in contact with the ground and indeed the dog which is just behind the two foreground figures also appears to be hovering just above the earth’s surface. Perhaps, I thought, this might be caused by some kind of ground-repulsion effect common to locations in the Deep South because if you look at the sleeve of John Hurt’s 1928 Sessions LP on the Yazoo label you can see the cow just behind John floating a good six inches above the surface of the pasture:

The cow doesn’t seem perturbed, but is probably used to it. It’s either a gravitational anomaly or faulty technique on the part of the artists.

Mind you, I think that if I had ever been lucky enough to hear John Hurt play live then I might have been seen to float a few inches off the ground too.

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John Morrison has written a little about Bob Dylan in Judas! and The Bridge and done book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement. He has been entranced, but not uncritically, by Dylan since he was a schoolboy in the early sixties. He adds: “I was the person who persuaded Barb Jungr to record Man In The Long Black Coat and who was then mocked (gently) whenever she sang the song in public."

The picture credit on the sleeve of the Yazoo album is to a Robert Burger. An apt name, given the prominence of the cow.

THE PICTURES BEHIND BOB DYLAN'S PAINTINGS

The other day I tweeted “I'm expecting Scott Warmuth to tell us on whose photographs Bob Dylan has based his New Orleans Series paintings." I wasn't joking, and of course he and others already have  come up with some of the pictures behind Dylan's. He tells me it was Tara-Jane Hulligan Zuk, a Liverpool-based Dylan fan, who spotted this Leonard Freed photo of a boy and a blind man used by Dylan:

Dylan, of course, hadn't sat around in a New Orleans courtyard for hours painting the scene in front of him either. Indeed:

Scott Warmuth found that old postcard image back on January 20 (2013) when the Dylan paintings were first glimpsed online. He tells me that Anneke Derksen, a Dylan fan from Antwerp, found other postcards, including this:

Something like same argument might apply as over the Asia Series. The fact that Dylan's paintings are of other people's scenes may or may not make all this smell funny  -  other artists have followed much the same method  -  but it does seem sad. Here is someone whose generous creativity changed the times with a highly personal, hands-on plunge into the maelstrom of America, and who is now making millions of dollars essentially by copying other people's work. How much more you could admire that courtyard painting if Bob Dylan had  sat there for hours to achieve it.

The publicity for the New Orleans Series doesn't quite make the same spurious claim as with the Asia Series, that Dylan painted from life itself:

The 71-year-old star, whose works already hang in various European art galleries, came to inaugurate the exhibition himself earlier this week. “Each work is a fragment of a bigger story and each image is halfway between dream and memory," said a spokesperson for Milan City Hall, which is organising the show. It said the paintings were based on photographic images and had “a strange atmosphere of suspense" with their stories of love and violence. [from Art Daily]

Yet while it states very clearly that the paintings are based on photographs, and the rest of the wording can't be pinned on Dylan himself, there is a specious sort of semi-claim here, isn't there? “Halfway between dream and memory?" Whose?

BOB DYLAN & HIS NEW ORLEANS PAINTINGS IN MILAN

Bob Dylan visits his art exhibition (of the New Orleans Series of paintings) in Milan, with an absolutely thrilled mayor of the city. And the museum curator shows us the paintings: