Bob Dylan’s surprising hidden talent
Everyone needs a hobby, especially people working with something as abstract as music. Unlike the act of painting, sculpting or even acting, composing music doesn’t produce physical results. It has very little connection to the real world, existing only on a molecular level – an invisible tide of sound waves travelling across the empty air. No wonder so many musicians – Bob Dylan included – are obsessed with woodwork, gardening and other hands-on crafts. Such hobbies clearly ease the frustration of never seeing one’s efforts manifested in the physical world.
Bob Dylan is famously good with his hands. As well as possessing a remarkable talent for painting, the folk-rock icon has frequently experimented with ironwork In 2013, for example, he exhibited seven wrought-iron gates at London’s Halcyon Gallery. “I’ve been around iron all my life ever since I was a kid,” he said at the time. “I was born and raised in iron ore country, where you could breathe it and smell it every day.”
Dylan was, of course, talking about Hibbing, Minnesota, the mid-western mining town the Zimmerman family moved to from Duluth when he was still a child. Recalling his main impression of the town, one defined by penetrating cold and industrial clamour, Dylan wrote in Chronicles: “The heavy rumble of the foghorns (of the big lake freighters that) dragged you out of your senses by the neck. As a child, slight, introverted and asthma-stricken, the sound was so loud, so enveloping, I could feel it in my whole body and it made me feel hollow. Something out there could swallow me up.”
Dylan left Hibbing at the age of 19, hitching a ride to New York to make his name as a folk musician. His obsession with ironwork would suggest he took a small part of Hibbing with him on that long journey east. Indeed, it’s not just the iron itself that has fascinated Bob for so many years but the way such a powerful, stubborn metal can be bent and warped to create something ornate: “Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow,” Dylan said.
“They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways, there is no difference.”
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