John Mellencamp

American populist songwriter John Mellencamp is also an accomplished painter. After attending the Art Students League in New York in the 1980s, Mellencamp developed a style that fuses the aesthetic approaches of the German expressionists Max Beckmann and Otto Dix with that of American neo-expressionists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente. His oil paintings combine portraits of everyday Americans with a cast of universally recognized symbols—hearts, guitars, targets, and crowns—and words such as “dreams,” “blues,” and “freedom.”