Indiana icon John Mellencamp has been known as a rock ‘n’ roll legend for over 40 years, topping Billboard charts with heartland hits such as “Small Town” and “Jack & Diane.”
While Mellencamp took on social issues with heartfelt insight in pieces such as “Pink Houses” and “Rain on The Scarecrow,” music was not the only art form he embraced as a means by which to extract and communicate the most profound dilemmas of the human soul, as he is also a serious painter.
The exhibit, entitled “Crossroads: The Paintings of John Mellencamp”, was on display Sept. 5-Dec. 15 in the IU Eskenazi Museum of Art’s Jodi and Milt Stewart Gallery.
The exhibit featured 50 of Mellencamp’s original paintings, with recurring themes of societal ostracization and disfigurement.
In addition to a few miscellaneous works, the exhibit was primarily composed of five categories: “Self-Portraits,” “Small towns,” “Relationships,” “Outsiders” and “Politics.”
“Self-Portraits” depicts Mellencamp as he sees himself as a performer with humorous exaggerations and distortions, like in “Melvis II” where he mixes his features with Elvis Presley’s.
“Politics” and “Relationships” serve to contrast one another with a blunt distinction between depictions of darkness and light.
Mellencamp studied German expressionism under David Leffel at the Art Students League of New York, adopting a painting style consistent of distortions of reality that serve to reflect internal states of the artist’s mind.
The “Relationships” section of the exhibition stands in stark contrast to the other sections of the exhibit.
“Politics” depicts subjects such as Marlon Brando and James Dean, and images of indigenous people and oppression of enslaved people.
While “Politics” presented the subject of a wounded child crying out his last breaths, the opposite corner of the gallery depicted nothing but calm and beauty in the form of a charcoal and oil sketch of American actress and Mellencamp’s former girlfriend Meg Ryan. The gallery seemed to intentionally showcase light and darkness on opposite corners.
"Crossroads” covered several different themes, in both form and message. Distorted physical features were a theme throughout each category.
The exhibit was defined by mysteriousness and subversion, that at times was blunt and gritty and at other times subtle. However, “Relationships” consists of the familiar and the gentile, as each work holds each subject in high regard, appearing careful and reserved in its presentation of each.
Works in “Relationships” consisted of “Uncle Joe” and “Grandma,” which according to the exhibit, “exude authority and toughness, reflecting the artist’s profound respect for these family elders.” The exhibition also states that Mellencamp referred to his Uncle Joe as “the toughest man he ever met.”
“Relationships” also featured depictions of some of Mellencamp’s family members, friends and former flames. “Drainy” depicted his third wife Elaine Irwin and “Hud” depicts his older son Hud.
“Dodo on the Moon" served as a spiritual sequel to “Hud,” as it depicts his granddaughter around the same age as his son in the earlier work. It also distinctively contrasts Mellencamp’s more recent work with his earlier paintings. His artistic style morphed from ordinary German expressionism, to what the exhibit calls something “more minimal and linear," as well as more realistic and less abstract in form and nature.
This same evolution is seen in “Maggie,” a sketch of Ryan, where she almost seems to be fading away.
Sante Fe artist and Eskenazi patron Joshua Andrade was visiting the exhibition with his two brothers, one of whom is an IU student. He appreciated the free form nature of “Maggie,” citing the artistic freedom he would personally feel as an artist.
“Here, there’s like no form. Formless is the form,” Andrade said. “So, I feel like if I were to paint something or draw something like this, it’s a more free, more forgiving type.”
These two works also exhibit Mellencamp’s use of charcoal, as much of his work featured from the ‘90’s is limited to the use of oil on canvas, offering distinctive insight into his artistic development over time.
The “Politics” section of the exhibition includes “So This is Gun Control,” perhaps the most distinctive and emotionally evocative of the works. It depicts a dying child in pain, using Mellencamp’s own son Speck as a model, speaking to Mellencamp’s outspokenness on the issue. Mellencamp suggested news media outlets show the public the official police photos of the aftermath of school shootings in an August 2023 appearance on the “Club Random with Bill Maher" podcast.
Farm Aid Director Carolyn Mugar told the Indiana Daily Student at the Mellencamp statue unveiling ceremony in October 2024 the exhibition speaks to the artist’s many years as an activist, speaking up for family farmers before he even founded Farm Aid alongside Willie Nelson and Neil Young.
IU alumnus Cam Cunningham, who worked on the preparation of the exhibition as a student in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design, said Mellencamp is complex both as an artist and person.
“[Mellencamp] offers a raw, unique and maverick-like spirit that displays the reward of diligently following what is in your own heart and not being afraid to share it with the world,” Cunningham said.
Jennifer Mujezinovic, painter and owner of Clash Art Gallery on Kirkwood, also features Mellencamp’s original works at her gallery. She spoke to Mellencamp’s willingness to use art as a medium by which to tackle heavy issues as well as his artistic elusiveness and grace.
Touching on his sketch of Ryan, Mujezinovic said she thought it portrayed Ryan as angelic and spirit-like, while other patrons interpreted it as her fading out of his life while maintaining a sense of grace in his view. Mujezinovic believes this elusiveness in meaning is key to Mellencamp’s work.
IU alumnus and Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis believes the seriousness with which Mellencamp approaches the craft parallels that of the other art form that made the Seymour, Indiana, native a household name.
“It would be the easiest thing for a rock star to do stuff that everybody would look at and just [be] gleeful over, whereas John thinks of himself, and has thought of himself for a long time, as a serious painter,” Decurtis said. “I think he thinks of it as being important as his music.”
