Commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2012, Bob Dylan’s Face Value series marked only the sixth public exhibition of his artwork — following an initial showing in 2007 — and his first foray into portraiture.
Speaking on the series, Dylan said the chalk pastel sketches “were done on the run, mostly from inspiration and luck with transportable setups.” As for whether his subjects are real people or invented characters, he claimed that “source material is all real with a bit of fiction thrown in.” He elaborated, “One of the men is actually a member of the Sydney Yacht Club. One’s a limo driver. Another one is a glamorous type whose prettiness I chose to overlook.”
The titles of the portraits are as clever and enigmatic as the works themselves. Each consists of two parts: a play on the word “face” drawn from familiar phrases — such as Losing Face and On the Face of It — followed by a second element that assigns the subject a name, one that often blurs the line between reality and fiction.
Dylan employed a multi-step layering process to create the portraits, beginning with a preliminary drawing to define the figure’s contours and features — the original sketch lines remain visible in Face Down: Nick Riley and Face to Face: Ursula Belle. He then added skin tones, followed by darker hues, before introducing short contour lines in brown or black chalk. He continued to build and smudge layers, refining the features while creating areas of deliberate ambiguity.
The National Portrait Gallery exhibited Dylan’s Face Value series from Aug. 2013 to Jan. 2014, after which it traveled to Denmark, the United States and Germany. In May 2019, Bob Dylan: Face Value and Beyond — the first public exhibition drawn from the Bob Dylan Archive — opened at the Gilcrease Museum and ran through Jan. 2020. The exhibition presented all twelve portraits on loan from Jenny Norton and Bob Ramsey, who subsequently donated the works to the Bob Dylan Center in 2022. We gratefully acknowledge their generous gift to our permanent collection.
