As one of the most influential artists of all time, Bob Dylan has sold more than 125 million records. His contribution to worldwide culture has been honoured with many awards. These include an Academy Award for his song ‘Things Have Changed’, along with 10 Grammy Awards and a Special Citation Pulitzer Prize for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture”. Further accolades include France’s prestigious appointment of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, a Kennedy Center Honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Prize in Literature for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

However, Bob Dylan is now just as revered for his fine art, which offers a unique insight into his extraordinary world. He dates the origins of his work as a visual artist to the early 1960s, when some of his drawings reached the public gaze with album covers like The Band’s Music from Big Pink (1968) and his own Self Portrait (1970). In 1974, Dylan spent two seminal months studying art with Ashcan School tutor Norman Raeben, who philosophised the importance of ‘perceptual honesty’ – painting life as it as seen, not imagined. Dylan says of this time: “He put my mind and my hand and my eye together, in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.”

The artist’s extraordinary powers of observation extend from his music and lyrics, thorough to his art, particularly when it comes to his explorations of the USA in the Beaten Path series, which finds beauty in the overlooked locations that form the backdrop of daily life for most Americans.

Says Dylan: “The common theme of these works is how you see the American landscape while crisscrossing the land and seeing it for what it’s worth. Staying out of the mainstream and travelling the back roads, free born style”.