Bob Dylan

I probably approached this illustration too cautiously, as it still feels and looks a little safe to me. I think if this had not of been the first of the series it may well have been more adventurous. The article the illustration is based on deals with Dylan in the early to mid sixties, when he alternated from being a folk singer to an electric rocker. The title of the article reads: "The contrarian of a generation", so I focused my idea around that concept. Obviously "contrarian" suggests an opposite to something, but also a conflict. In this case it was a conflict between two kinds of music; acoustic and electric. But for me it also focuses on a kind of 'natural' evolution. On one side of the pic we have a younger Dylan; the folk-style singer and musician based in the early years of the sixties. Whilst on the opposite side we have the musical progression, the slightly older Dylan, bursting away from the past, moving forward into the peak of the sixties. This musical 'freedom', or breaking away from tradition, moving forward and evolving, was a constant theme of the sixties, and therefore something I felt would be appropriate to capture in the illustration, however slight.