John Mellencamp has two sons, Hud Mellencamp and Speck. Speck Mellencamp is the youngest of them all. He and his brother Hud are the products of John’s marriage to Elaine Irwin.
The 25-year-old didn’t follow his father’s footsteps into show business like his half-sister Teddi. He, however, shares his appreciation for painting and paints well enough to be featured in an exhibition.
He was one of the featured artists in the October 2019 exhibition “Mellencamp: Three Generations of Art.” The exhibition was organized by the Southern Indiana Center for the Arts. The exhibit included paintings across three generations of the Mellencamps, his grandmothers, father, and himself.
Speck studied art at Rhode Island School of Design and graduated in the class of 2019. He was an intern at the Butler in the summer of 2017. Of all of John’s children, he took to art most. Justice stopped painting when she got her first child and usually just does sketches.
Speck is quite involved in the local Indian art scene and has had several art classes at the Indiana art center, Seymour, in February of 2019. For two weeks, he led oil painting classes for interested students.
Bearing the famous Mellencamp surname isn’t the only thing that has made Speck famous. He and his brother Hud have had several brushes with the law. In 2017, Speck was arrested on a charge of public intoxication after he was involved in a spat outside of an Indiana sandwich shop.
He pled guilty to the charge and was sentenced to 25 hours of community service and six months of probation. Also, he and Hud spent a few days in a Monroe county jail in 2015 after they pled guilty to a misdemeanor battery charge. They had allegedly assaulted an unnamed 19-year-old man and severely injured him.