New Bob Dylan artwork features Route 66

Bob Dylan artwork, Roy's in Amboy

A new show, “The Beaten Path,” at a gallery in London features Bob Dylan artwork that includes several images of Route 66.

The Halcyon Gallery is showing the famed singer-songwriter and recent Nobel laureate’s acrylic paintings, sketches and watercolors of American landscapes through Dec. 11. According to Vanity Fair, Dylan had worked on them for the past 2 1/2 years.

The exhibition also will make its way to China next year. You can see nearly 20 paintings in a slide show here and more in two videos.

I spotted Route 66 landmarks Dylan painted:

  • Titled “Florida Country,” it’s actually the long-closed Paradise Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico.
  • Roy’s in Amboy, California.
  • The Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona.
  • Barbed Wire Museum in McLean, Texas.
  • Old Route 66 Truck and Auto Service station in San Jon, New Mexico.
  • U-Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas.
  • The Supai Motel along Seligman, Arizona.

This video inspired by the show also proves to be quite evocative:

Dylan also wrote an essay to go with the show. This excerpt stood out:

The common theme of these works having something to do with the American landscape—how you see it while crisscrossing the land and seeing it for what it’s worth. Staying out of the mainstream and traveling the back roads, free-born style. I believe that the key to the future is in the remnants of the past. That you have to master the idioms of your own time before you can have any identity in the present tense. Your past begins the day you were born and to disregard it is cheating yourself of who you really are.

(Excerpted image of Bob Dylan artwork from Wochit Entertainment video)

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