John Mellencamp is a natural storyteller. Known over the course of his successful four-decade music career for his acutely observed songs about the American landscape and its cast of characters, Mellencamp has been equally productive if less recognized as a painter mining similar terrain. He first threw himself seriously into art in the late 1980s, making stark, expressive portraits of family and friends as he studied the craft and history of painting. In recent years, he has incorporated the looser, more jangly rhythms of street art into panoramic canvases that reflect his social and political activism also present in his music. “The songwriting and the painting are very closely knitted together,” says Mellencamp, who often will pick up his guitar or start a canvas without premeditation and see what suggests itself to him. “Everything is a possible song. Everything is a possible painting.” artes fine arts magazine

From April 12 through June 10, 2012, the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville brings together his first museum show—a retrospective view of more than 50 canvases in Nothing Like I Planned: The Art of John Mellencamp. “He is a great American musician from an agricultural heartland, which is close to our own agrarian roots,” says the museum’s executive director Lois Riggins-Ezzell, of Mellencamp who was born in the small town of Seymour, Indiana, in 1951 (he’s still based in Indiana outside Bloomington) and cofounded Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and Neil Young in 1985—a series of annual concerts to help keep American family farmers on their land. “In his painting, he speaks to the voice of the heartland which is about doing the right thing and about equality and humanity and about the dignity of the farmer and the laborer and the dignity of the musician. His paintings speak to how the light sees us and how other people see us and to the depth of how we see ourselves in the dark.”

While Mellencamp has never been interested in whether he captures a faithful likeness of his subjects, he is after a kind of emotional realism and does follow certain “rules” of painting. Influenced by his mother who painted in the basement of the family home throughout his childhood, when Mellencamp showed early interest in drawing and painting, he had his first formal training at the Art Students League in New York with the portrait painter David Leffel in 1988. From him, Mellencamp learned the technique of painting dark to light in the manner of Rembrandt and other old masters. “It’s as big a rule as you can’t put the roof on the house until you have the foundation,” says Mellencamp, who studied as well with Jan Royce from the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. He also began his own self-education in art history, visiting museums across Europe and America whenever he was on tour and studying a broad spectrum of artists and the mechanics of their work. “I’m always looking to see if there was drawing on the canvas, if it was projected, or if it was coming strictly from someone’s imagination,” says Mellencamp, “if they had a model or if they did it from a photograph, what kind of medium they must have used, any other tricks of the trade.”

His discovery of early 20th-century modernists including Chaim Soutine, Walt Kuhn, and particularly the German Expressionists Otto Dix and Max Beckmann pointed the way toward a visceral, pared down approach to portraiture. “German painting remains the basic foundation for what I do, same as folk music is the foundation of my songs,” says Mellencamp. “Discovering Beckmann to me was like discovering Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan.” Mellencamp’s paintings from the 1990s—of family and friends and many of himself—show lone figures isolated frontally against simple, shadowy backgrounds. They stare down the viewer or off into space with eyes both tough and vulnerable, projecting a psychological intensity akin to Beckmann’s self-portraits with his sad, glowering eyes. Mellencamp’s portraits all tell personal stories, be it John After Heart Attack (1994), a harshly painted dead-on view of the artist looking haggard after suffering a brush with mortality, or John with Puppet (1992), a severely angular self-depiction with a marionette dangling from his elongated fingers. It suggests disgust or defiance at the feeling of being manipulated. A more complex, multi-figure canvas was painted in the aftermath of Mellencamp’s difficult divorce from his second wife. Titled Gates of Hell (1991-92), two figures stand stiffly side by side, not unlike the dour couple in Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic, with two bloodthirsty dogs howling in front of them and the shadow of Satan on the back wall. It is a brutal allegory for emotional torture.

Mellencamp doesn’t wince at grappling with issues of his heart, whether autobiographical or political. Since 2005, he has taken on themes such as racism, war, faith, and justice and broken with some of the formalism of his earlier work. He often paints in a freer, more graffiti-like style, layering text and pictographic images on canvases evocative of the frenetic street-art energy of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat and influenced by the anonymous murals he sees out car windows when he travels around the country. In MLK (2005), scrawled over a canvas with an oversized face of a scared African American man are the words “Martin Luther King had a dream and this ain’t it”; a row of crosses along the top form a sort of crown over the man’s head. Using a mix of oils, house paint, and spray paint, Mellencamp says the painting flowed from him spontaneously and he was surprised but pleased with the raw expressionistic quality. Coast to Coast (2005) is a dense collage of quickly painted words and images mapping the quilt of America, including a man being electrocuted representing Texas, the couple from American Gothic modified with bleeding eyes standing for the farmers of the heartland, and the dignified, sorrowful face of a Native American looming over the southwest. “I finally got the confidence to paint as a 12 year old,” says Mellencamp, who felt he had to master the rules of painting before he could mess with them.

Even in his most freehand works, he always pays attention to what he calls the “math”— like the beats per measure in a song—that gives a sense of structure and balance to his compositions. Mellencamp particularly likes the austere geometry of his recent painting Savannah, Georgia (2012), a return to his formally constructed portraits. Here a well-dressed but shifty-looking man stands dead center, his head just grazing a 5’ tall horizontal white chalk line behind him across the murky brown background with the stenciled letters “SAVANNAH GA POLICE DEPT” below. Essentially a mug shot, plucked from Mellencamp’s deck of characters known or imagined, the painting both yields and withholds information, as do all his portraits in some way, raising as many questions as it answers.

For Mellencamp, painting has always been a refuge, a solitary antidote to the hectic life of touring and performing. He doesn’t see it as a precious or rarified activity but rather about staying productive, keeping his mind engaged, making something out of nothing. “Every day that I walk up in my art studio and I complete a painting, I have something to show for my time,” says Mellencamp, who sees himself painting through old age. “I have millions of them in me.”

By Hilarie M. Sheets, Contributing Writer

Hilarie M. Sheets is an independent critic and journalist focused on contemporary art and culture. She is a contributing editor to ARTnews and writes regularly for The New York Times, Art + Auction, W, and Art in America. She has authored numerous gallery exhibition catalogues for artists including Tom Otterness, Will Ryman, and Enoc Perez.

Visit the Tennessee State Museum at: http://www.tnmuseum.org/

See family photos and listen to John Mellencamp perform Small Town: