When Dylan paints his masterpiece

Bob Dylan is neither a conventionally "great" singer nor a virtuoso guitarist but he is a brilliant poet and that intuitive factor makes the genius.

Transposing that to painting results in this irresistibly intriguing collection. The opening scenes of empty railroad tracks are reminders of the folk singer’s hobo lifestyle and his paintings chart the characters met along the way, ordinary, mostly anonymous people, who fuel his narratives.

In 1989-92, a collection of published pencil drawings opened up Dylan’s previously private life. Last year, he printed them on fine paper and filled in the black-outlined shapes with watercolours and gouache. The intense colours and the textural application of paint, changed meaning and mood, expression and character — as his hit songs have been re-worked for decades.

Anonymous hotel rooms with simple furnishings, figure heavily and suggest loneliness. But this is surely where Dylan is freed from pressures and draws — watching from windows and across rooms. His overview of "Bell Tower, Stockholm" in four versions, changes palettes like seasons, and employs short, bitty cold strokes and sharp, colour-drenched patterning evoking Matisse.

His experimental portraits of women (a favourite subject), where the minimal expressive flourishes of a pencil are dressed in paint, become something radically different. From his window — using a telescope like a voyeur in Hitchcock’s "Rear Window" — he draws two "Sisters" lying on a bed, one naked but for her bra. It forms the basis of four studies where mood and relationship change with shifting colours.

The accompanying text attempts to position Dylan on the Art historical spectrum. Although the ghost of Van Gogh hovers around the lost soul in Man on a Bridge, and Matisse’s dancing girls are evoked in a couple of poses, the painter is as impossible to pin down as is the uniquely original musician. A fascinating collection and surprisingly literal for a poet of such extreme surreal imagery.

Opens 14 June (0870 013 0661 www.halcyongallery.com).

Bob Dylan: Drawn Blank
Halcyon Gallery