Short description
In December 2003 the painter Jack Vettriano, a coalminer's son, met his parents off the train from Scotland on his way to collect an OBE. Over the last few years Vettriano has had a meteoric rise to fame - emerging from the unlikely background of the Scottish coalfields, unknown and untutored, he has become Scotland's most successful and controversial contemporary artist.
Long description
In December 2003 the painter Jack Vettriano, a coalminer's son, met his parents off the train from Scotland on his way to collect an OBE. Over the last few years Vettriano has had a meteoric rise to fame - emerging from the unlikely background of the Scottish coalfields, unknown and untutored, he has become Scotland's most successful and controversial contemporary artist. Appearing on posters and cards, mugs and umbrellas, prints of his work outsell Van Gough, Dali and Monet and his paintings have been acquired by celebrities around the world. Vettriano's images have an often mysterious narrative and are a gateway to an alluring yet sinister world. Daylight scenes of heady optimism, painted against backdrops of beaches and racetracks, are counterbalanced by more disquieting canvases of complex night-time liaisons in bars and clubs, bedrooms and ballrooms. Both sexes are clearly styled - the men hard-edged and mysterious, the women seductive and enigmatic. Yet beneath the confident posturing, Vettriano recognizes our inherent human frailty, that there is no victor in the struggle between duplicity and desire.;Men and women are ultimately trapped by the machinations of intense love and passion with little control over their destiny. Jack Vettriano: A Life presents about thirty new images, due to be exhibited in June 2004, as well as some recently surfaced works, plus the best of the paintings previously published in Lovers and Other Strangers and Fallen Angels, also by Pavilion. In March 2004 Melvin Bragg's The South Bank Show will broadcast a programme dedicated to Jack entitled Jack Vettriano: The People's Painter.
Review
Jack Vettriano's paintings, such as the ubiquitous "The Singing Butler", are a cultural phenomenon. Widely reproduced, his images seem to have struck a chord in the popular imagination. More than most contemporary artists, it's true to say that you either love or loathe Vettriano. His paintings speak of a nostalgia, almost a nonexistent near past, and have a romantic, aesthetic appeal in that way, but the subjects are consistently, unrelentingly, a certain type of relationship between men and women. Vettriano clearly adores women, is fascinated by them and attracted to a certain type. However, his view of relationships is very much "them" and "us", "us" being men and therefore normal people, and "them" being the inscrutable ideal female, defined by her sexual characteristics. This misogyny is portrayed in scenes of possession, of mild sexual domination of women, occasionally veering into soft porn. A usual theme of Vettriano's paintings is the frisson between strangers, perhaps meeting in a bar, or illicit lovers arriving at their appointment. The man in the painting is usually a version of self portraiture - Vettriano always places himself in the fantasy, yet the woman is a type, not really inhabited - a willing sexual object. The rise to fame, riches and prominence of Vettriano is an interesting story - as a self taught painter his accomplishment of the craft is extraordinary, and he seems to have an instinctive sense of composition which make his paintings work. There is something familiar in these paintings, you can "get" them, understand the situations and imagine the implied narrative in a mythical 1950's where men and women have encounters for sex alone without any complications of relationships. This book is lavishly illustrated with good reproductions yet has little text. There is no hint of critical analysis, yet this work doesn't pretend to stand up to such analysis, and the critical debate about Vettriano has centered on the state of public taste. His paintings are what they are, and if Vettriano does it for you, then this book will satisfy. (Kirkus UK)