As the holidays approach, our column takes a more homey turn, savoring the ways that a pair of the icons who soundtracked our young lives have also long been busy with brush and canvas. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, our folksy mom and dad and iconic troubadours of the American songbook, are creatives who each paint exactly the way they play—layered, lyrical, and acutely attuned to life’s telling textures and meaningful details. It’s earnest work, looking for life’s ordinary poetry—and though it’s side dishes where music has been their main courses, each of them have used their work on album covers over the years, making it clear that visuality has been their constant companion.
Dylan’s second life as a painter involves extending the vernacular poetics of his music into the visual register. Since the ’60s, he has sketched and painted scenes from memory and travel—motels, diners, rusted cars, industrial skylines—rendered in watercolor, acrylic, oil, and even welded iron. His Drawn Blank Series, reworked in 2007 from tour notebooks, sets an earthy tone: loose, atmospheric, rooted in the everyday. Later projects like The Beaten Path fix overlooked spaces in the cultural memory. His style favors bold color, strong outline, and a slightly naïve draftsmanship, recalling both folk art and German Expressionism. Like his music, the paintings mythologize the ordinary, evoking melancholy, grit, and the romance of the road.
Joni Mitchell has always considered herself, “a painter derailed by circumstance,” and in fact trained in commercial art before music took hold of her destiny. Yet she has painted all along, often designing her own album covers—Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon, Turbulent Indigo—with self-portraits and lyrical abstractions that mirror her emotional candor. Her portraits, especially of herself, are psychologically charged: elongated features, probing eyes, boldly colored, as in Turbulent Indigo, where she recasts herself as Van Gogh. Her landscapes, looser and more impressionistic, capture skies and foliage with the same haunting, moody lyricism we expect from her songbook. Across subjects, her brushwork is energetic, her palette shifting from earthy greens to piercing blues and fiery oranges.
Both remind us that for true artists, self-expression spills into every act—in a seasonal reminder that art can be music’s best side dish.
Bob Dylan images courtesy of Halcyon Gallery
Joni Mitchell images courtesy of Joni Mitchell/Canongate Books
