Bob Dylan art show in Santa Monica; ‘Basement Tapes’ app upgrade

Bob Dylan revealed several years ago that he admires Neil Young’s music so much that he once trekked through rural Canada to scout out Young’s boyhood home. Now it looks like he’s shadowing the “Long May You Run” rocker again.

Three days after a new exhibit of Neil Young’s watercolor paintings illustrating his new book, “Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life and Cars,” opened in Santa Monica, the same art gallery complex is hosting the first West Coast exhibition of paintings Dylan made from 1989 to 1992, “The Drawn Blank Series.”

The exhibition includes the premiere of a new collection of eight limited-edition prints as well as three original Dylan canvases.

“Based on drawings and sketches made by Dylan while on the road during the period of 1989 through 1992, ‘The Drawn Blank Series’ visually echo the stylistic hallmarks of Dylan’s prose, poetry and music,” according to a description of the show from the gallery. “Dylan chronicled his life on the road: in between gigs, on trains, in cafés, backstage. The drawings trace his everyday observations, his thought process and his vision.”

A portion of the proceeds from the opening night event tonight at the Andrew Weiss Gallery in the Bergamot Station Arts Center will be donated to P.S. Arts, a nonprofit organization that promotes and supports arts education for public school children in underserved communities.

The show is slated to run through Jan. 3 in the Andrew Weiss Gallery, D4, 2525 Michigan Ave. More information is available at the gallery’s website or (310) 246-9333.

The Neil Young “Special Deluxe” exhibition is nearby in the Robert Berman Gallery, building B7, and will extend through Nov. 29.

Elsewhere, the official Bob Dylan smartphone app has been upgraded with a slew of new content stemming from this week’s release of “Bob Dylan—The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11.” The iOS app is a free download through Apple’s App Store.

“The revised Bob Dylan Bootleg Series iOS app will link to ‘The Basement Tapes Wiki,’ an informative new destination on BobDylan.com (wiki.bobdylan.com) compiling crowd-sourced Basement Tapes information and lore from Dylan fans all over the globe,” a statement from Sony Legacy Recordings says.

The app was introduced last fall in conjunction with the expanded reissue of Dylan’s 1970 album “Self Portrait,” the cover of which was a painting of Dylan, by Dylan.

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