GUEST: That's me in 1989 with John Mellencamp. We were in the kitchen, and it was one of our friends that just snapped that picture.
APPRAISER: All right, it's a lovely photograph.
GUEST: Thank you.
APPRAISER: How do you know John Mellencamp?
GUEST: I worked for him at the time.
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: And of course, most people know him as a musician.
APPRAISER: Of course. Less so, perhaps, as an artist, but that's changing rather, these days.
GUEST: It is. But he was painting even at that time. He was painting in the garage. He was painting this picture, and one night, he brought it into the kitchen and he had painted her with her eyes closed, and I said, "John, you really need to open her eyes." And I said, "And her name is Gabrielle." And so he took the painting and painted her eyes open, and later he asked me to have prints made of it. So I did that. This is one of the prints, number 12 of 20 that we had done, and I had to ask him if I could have one, and he gave me this one.
APPRAISER: And are you still in touch with John Mellencamp? Are you still friends?
GUEST: We're still friends, absolutely.
APPRAISER: Good. Again, so he's following in rather a long tradition of musicians who are also artists or painted. But I understand it was Bob Dylan, in fact, who suggested that John Mellencamp should show his work.
GUEST: Oh, I didn't know that.
APPRAISER: Were you aware of that?
GUEST: No.
APPRAISER: What about this one here, how did you come by that?
GUEST: Well, I was, again, at John's, and one day he said, "Go out in the studio and pick a painting." So I went and the first painting I picked, he had promised to someone else. So this painting was very bright and colorful, and I like that, because John likes to paint sad people. So when I saw that one, I said, "I really like the colors in it," and I showed him the one I wanted, and he said, "Okay," and he gave it to me.
APPRAISER: I think it was a good choice. I have to admit, I quite like the sad, dark ones, because I found out two of his favorite painters who influenced him are two of my favorite artists-- the German painters Otto Dix and Max Beckmann.
GUEST: Oh!
APPRAISER: And I believe he collects the latter one. And you can see that influence in some of the other works, not so much in this one.
GUEST: No.
APPRAISER: As well as quite a lot of what was going on back in the '80s, with Neo-Expressionism and artists like Basquiat and Francesco Clemente. You can see some of that coming in. This one's interesting-- it's quite different, really, to the other works. You're right, it is airier. It's still got quite an Expressionistic look to it in terms of the color, and also the way the paint is being moved around-- there's great energy in the surface, which I really like.
GUEST: I did, too.
APPRAISER: The painting is signed and it's also dated 1989, or '89.
GUEST: Correct.
APPRAISER: And the medium in this one is oil paint. He seems to have used a palette knife quite a lot, rather than the brush. Because he falls rather between fine art and pop culture, I had a chat with my friends over at the collectibles table, who deal with pop cultural things, and they were interested to know about his paintings, and we discussed it. And they felt, for an insurance figure for the painting, for the oil, probably around about $15,000.
GUEST: Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Okay.
APPRAISER: And for the print, say, $2,000, maybe $2,500.
GUEST: Okay.
