At the height of his fame in the 1960s, it was hard for Bob Dylan to leave the house without bumping into an obsessed fan going through his bins. Sunglasses made him only more recognisable, though it’s fair to say he actively courted fame even as he bristled at its trappings. It took a near-fatal motorcycle crash in 1966 for him to retire from public view and, when he re-emerged a year later (having written more than 100 songs in the meantime), he seemed to want little more than a simple, quiet life in upstate New York.
Thus began his parallel career as a master of disguise – though sometimes he has blended in a little too well. In 2001, in Central Point, Oregon, Dylan was turned away from his own concert by over-zealous security guards. Eight years later, homeowners in Long Branch, New Jersey, called the police on a suspicious bedraggled figure peering into a nearby home in the middle of a downpour – only for the cops to discover that it was Bob Dylan ‘out for a walk’. And last November, the singer was browsing at a Christmas market in Belfast when he decided to buy a painting of himself by a Derry-based artist named Michael McLaughlin. McLaughlin has now made headlines for selling him the painting without having the faintest idea who he was – despite having recently seen him in concert.
Some might see buying a portrait of yourself as an act of self-regard at odds with the meaning of Christmas, but Rakewell prefers to think of it as one painter supporting another in a tough market. (Dylan has always been keenly aware of the cost of living, as one of his funniest and most tender lyrics attests.) The singer’s sympathies have, in the past, extended not just to artists but also to portrait sitters. In ‘Visions of Johanna’ (1966) he surmised that Mona Lisa, judging by her smile, had the highway blues; in ‘Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight’, nearly 20 years later, he complained of feeling like he was stuck in a painting in the Louvre, unable to scratch his nose.
Meanwhile, Christmas seems to have come early for McLaughlin. Last month he got to meet two more of his unwitting sitters: Sopranos stars Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, who were in town to discuss the mobster TV drama at a live event.
Imperioli has a keen eye for art and he and his wife Victoria, a history of art graduate who works in interior design, have transformed their homes into galleries, full of paintings from the 17th to the 19th century. ‘I like modern art, but I don’t like living with it,’ Imperioli told Architectural Digest in 2023. ‘I like being transported to another time, in a way, in the home.’ So perhaps the print-like portrait McLaughlin presented to him in Belfast won’t be decking the halls anytime soon.
As for Dylan’s recent acquisition, Rakewell has not been able to verify which of the singer’s many guises McLaughlin painted him in. But in any case, Dylan was so much older then; he’s younger than that now.
