JOHN MELLENCAMP: AMERICAN PAINTINGS AND ASSEMBLAGES (SIGNED)

By:  JOHN MELLENCAMP

Publication Date:  November 15, 2022

Format:  Hardcover

Publisher:  Rizzoli International Publications

Trim Size:  12.28in. x 11.18in. x 1.18in.

About This Item:  Longtime music icon John Mellencamp's artistic expression has never been limited to song. The acclaimed singer-songwriter John Mellencamp has been an accomplished painter for more than four decades. This definitive survey--curated by Mellencamp himself--of his large-scale oil portraits and mixed-media assemblages documents America's heart and soul, revealing unsettling but beautiful truths with an antiestablishment frown and a rich sense of narrative. "Although we may primarily know Mellencamp as a rock star, one of the highest-selling of all time and a Hall of Famer, he is also a great painter, as this book shows. Not a musician who also paints... No, John legitimately belongs in the modern art pantheon, " says Bob Guccione Jr. in his essay that delineates the connection of Mellencamp's music and art, both imbued with the earnest voice of America's heartland.

 Meg Ryan

Review

"JOHN MELLENCAMP: AMERICAN PAINTINGS AND ASSEMBLAGES is the definitive survey—curated by the artist himself—of Mellencamp’s oeuvre as an expressionist painter, grabbing our attention through the canvas. . .Full of self-portraits made over the years as well as portraits of other well-known subects—including Marlon Brando, Johnny Cash, and Meg Ryan—as well as a variety of everyday people, Mellencamp’s art is storytelling at its finest." —BACKSTAGEAXXESS

About the Author

John Mellencamp, award-winning singer-songwriter and member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,is also a painter, collector, and longtime activist who has exhibited his work in galleries and museums across the United States. Dr. Louis A. Zona is the executive director and chief curator of the Butler Institute of American Art, in Youngstown, Ohio. David L. Shirey is a former foreign correspondent, critic, and editor with Newsweek magazine, a critic and cultural writer for the New York Times, and former chair of the MFA Fine Arts program at New York City’s School of Visual Arts. Award-winning editor and publisher Bob Guccione Jr. has created and managed some of America’s most iconic publishing brands, including Spin magazine and Gear magazine.

Paintings and Assemblages by John Mellencamp

curated by Academy senior critic Dexter Wimberly 

As his musical career flourished, John Mellencamp began to paint earnestly in 1980 with an early affinity for portraiture influenced by the works of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann. Mellencamp‘s kinship with the German Expressionism of the early 20th century, with its existential focus on the human condition, serves as the foundation for the development of his oeuvre. Mellencamp‘s paintings and assemblages document America’s heart and soul, revealing unsettling but beautiful truths with a kind of anti-establishment frown and a rich sense of narrative. Like his music, Mellencamp’s visual art is carefully composed through the structural requirements of harmony, rhythm and order, and are thematically in line with the small-town, earnest voice of the heartland.