BOB DYLAN, the singer-songwriter, poet, actor and author, has a new artistic string to his bow. He has opened his first exhibition of paintings and drawings.

However, fans who remember his song When I Paint My Masterpiece may be in for a disappointment. Dylan sketches what he sees and so there are rather a lot of hotel bedrooms from what he calls his "never-ending tour" of rock concerts, as well as views from bridges and railway lines and glances of half-seen passers-by.

One of the highlights is a painting of a curvaceous woman viewed by Dylan from behind while he was drinking in the Red Lion pub in Blackpool in 1992.

The exhibition, entitled The Drawn Blank Series, features 170 watercolours and pastel drawings and will run until February at a museum in Chemnitz, in eastern Germany.

Dylan, 66, has been sketching in his spare time for years and once put a childlike picture of himself on the cover of his appropriately named Self Portrait album of songs.

He was persuaded to mount his first show by Ingrid Mössinger, curator of the museum in the town that was known as Karl-Marx-Stadt when it was behind the iron curtain, While on a visit to New York, Mössinger had seen pencil and charcoal drawings that Dylan had made in the early 1990s for a book called Drawn Blank. She approached him and asked him to finish the works.

Over the next eight months Dylan completed 320 portraits, landscapes, still lifes and nudes.

Inspiration was hard to find for his songwriting after he was injured in a motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock, New York state. So he took art classes in the 1970s with Norman Raeben, a teacher in New York city. Dylan has not always been so willing to appear in an exhibition, though. "Great paintings should be where people hang out," he said in the 1960s. "Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner.

"It's not the bomb that has to go, man; it's the museums."

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