Bob Dylan / Painted from memory and from photographs

In a beginning painting class in the early 1980s, I painted an image of Bob Dylan in watercolor.  During the 1980s, I often used photos of Bob Dylan as a starting point for drawings and paintings.

Bob Dylan is 75 years old today.  Happy Birthday, Bob!  Thank you!

ADDENDUM:  Just for fun, here are some songs collected by Bob about "Friends and Neighbors":



ADDENDUM:

The Wild Blue Sky Of Day

Thanks to R. L. Bourges for the inspiration.

Sending all my love to my nephew and his girlfriend who
will be having a baby in May.

A NATION OF SLEEPLESS WOMEN WITH MOON AND BIRDS

Awake and alert

As full and fragmented as the moon

Rising and reflecting

In a western sea

We hear night birds

Singing in the shadows

Mocking darkness

Mocking darkness

The moon asks an impossible question:

Do I control you

Or do you control me

In my circular journey

We ask the moon an impossible question:

Do we control you

Or do you control us

In our cyclical journey

We hear night words

We sing in the shadows

Mocking darkness

Mocking darkness

Imagine us at dawn

A nation of sleepless women with moon and birds

Just above the hills of childhood

Caught between impossible questions

And the wild blue sky of day.

NURSERY  RHYME (1982)

Babies are like us

Except when they smile

Their eyes are so clear

They can see everything we have forgotten

At first they have nothing to say

We draw their attention

Away from holy light

To clocks and alphabets

Words like parallelogram

Make them laugh

They can’t tell time from applesauce

Yet they store words

With smooth stones and skinned knees

No one really knows where they come from

Or where they go

They would put the sun

In their mouths

If they could reach that high

Not knowing who we are

Still they trust us

We impress them

With our brave words

Our clever clocks

(poems and drawing, "The Wild Blue Sky of Day," by am from the early 1980s)

Life Drawing of a Young Woman #3 (1982)

When I began to show my chalk pastel life drawings, people commented that they reminded them of color photo negatives. It occurs to me now that with digital cameras there is no negative and that soon, if not already, the idea of a photo negative will not be understood without explanation. All these early drawings were photographed by me with a Minolta 7s camera. The colors are amazingly true. Until this last year, I photographed all my work with that camera. It is light enough outside now to see that the sky is a bluish grey. I can hear light rain. I remember reading that Georgia O'Keeffe used to paint her rooms grey because the colors in her drawings and paintings appeared with greater intensity when there was a grey background. That is what happens to colors on a grey day in the Northwest.