As a new exhibition of his work opens in his home town of Kirkcaldy this weekend, Jack Vettriano takes a journey around his childhood haunts

Published on Thursday 25 March 2010 18:02

DREICH weather wraps us in a moist, grey fug, but it's doubtful whether sunshine would be an improvement: Kirkcaldy is looking down on its luck. So although he's serious, I chuckle when Jack Vettriano says this used to be his Mecca.

• Jack Vettriano at Kirkcaldy art gallery. Picture: Neil Hanna

"I lived in a much smaller town and Kirkcaldy was always the place you aspired to. Edinburgh was too posh and too far away, whereas Kirkcaldy was only half an hour away by bus and 20 minutes away by car. And, of course, you knew that if you were going to pick someone up, they were going to live pretty locally, which made life a bit easier for you."

Vettriano has invited The Scotsman for a tour of where he grew up in honour of the exhibition opening tomorrow at the Kirkcaldy Museum & Art Gallery. And as we purr through the streets in his low-slung Audi – its interior the same red as his leather living room suite – we talk.

"It's not just the recession," he says. "The town centre has suffered at the hands of the shopping estate. When I was young, Kirkcaldy high street had lots of small independent retailers. But the big boys started to move in, the chains. All these little retailers that used to give the town some kind of soul get driven out, and what's left? The high street is full of amusement arcades. That's bound to have an effect, all these young guys hanging out at the arcades."

Not for Vettriano pumping money into the puggies or hanging around in pubs. Back in the day, you'd have found him in his best mod finery, dancing and romancing in the local ballrooms. For though he's not keen on lad culture, there's an element of Jack the Lad about him regarding women.

He's a funny mix. Grumpy today – possibly because it's his sixth day without a cigarette – but friendly about it. Happy to talk, but suspicious about how I'll portray him. Me, I have no agenda, bar the bet with myself – which I reveal to him later – not to discuss sex with the artist famous for paintings that make one feel like a voyeur.

I discover there's no avoiding obsession. It's only on the replay that I twig that his very first soundbite referenced sex, and no matter how doggedly I try steering the conversation elsewhere, it always returns to sex.

The streets roll past. Does seeing Kirkcaldy – once everything he aspired to – as it is now sadden him? "It kind of perplexes me. I keep my flat here, a) because it's a beautiful space and even if it was the middle of the darkest place in the world, you'd still enjoy the building itself, and b) because my parents are still alive and nearby. There is something about being Scottish that makes you want to hang on to your roots. When the plane comes up past North Berwick and turns, you see the Fife coastline quite clearly, and that does make you feel a certain pride."

But why, I pester – only to get an earful about how England raped and pillaged and taunted the Scots (the Welsh, the Irish), making it "all the more special to be Scottish". Later, however, he says he doesn't buy into the whole Scotland- England divide, but that, like "any professional person, especially in arts, I had to get out of Scotland in order to grow as an artist". Later still, he gets riled up about Culloden. Head spinning, I keep schtum.

We concur about the absurdity of the "I kent his faither" syndrome. Vettriano says: "I'm not sure it's just a Scottish thing, it's a human thing, to find it difficult being a success in your own backyard. If you went down Leven High Street today asking people, 'Do you remember Jack Hoggan? What was he like?' They'd say, 'Oh him, he was a f****** wanker.'" He laughs. "Each one has a story to tell about me. I am sure I was a wanker sometimes, but I've never been in prison and have only ever been in court for motoring charges, which is rare for this area."

We drive into Methilhill, past the mining cottage that was home from his birth in 1951 to the age of ten, when his mum was expecting her fourth child and they outgrow the two- bedroom house.

"This was one of those towns where you were measured by the amount of alcohol you could take. I think it's to do with the narrowness of (aspiration here]. My father had no aspirations for his family other than he wanted me to get a trade; he didn't want me to be a miner. When you're growing up in that kind of environment, where there's no question of university – it's just not on the agenda – then I think it becomes so narrow that you fall into that trap of saying, 'So, what are you about then?' 'Well, I can drink eight pints of lager, that's what I'm about.'"

From there, they moved to Leven. "As a young boy, that was a major move, like moving to Edinburgh. Leven had a high street, cinemas, a beach, a fairground that came every year – it seemed to have a lot more going for it."

Outside the Regent Cinema, which recently reopened as such after years as a bingo hall, he recalls sneaking in to catch Hammer House of Horror films. "Anything at all where we thought we might manage to see even a partial breast. There was no question of going to a movie to learn anything or because it was by a particular director, it was all based on either horror or sex."

His gaze wanders to an alley that was once a through road. And there – can I see that ugly modern building? – that was a stable. "When I was a wee boy, the chap would turn up and get the horses ready, and I used to deliver newspapers and milk and stuff."

We make our way to the beach, but rather than steering me to a pretty stretch of sand to recreate The Singing Butler, Vettriano lingers near the power station, the inspiration for his painting Long Time Gone. As a kid, he played on the rocky sands below.

"This area was (like] an adventure playground. I got a free rein. At nine, I could go away for the day. My parents didn't have the same concern that there is now. We didn't know about paedophiles. Back then, there were a couple of dubious characters that used to hang around the changing rooms of the local park, but we never considered them to be any risk."

He points, saying: "When the tide comes in, that's all covered in water! When I think of the chances we took with the sea and water and stuff!" Not to mention proximity to a power station, I add.

Noticing shafts of light piercing the horizon, I ask what he sees with his artist's eye. He reminds me that landscapes aren't his speciality or pleasure. Though later, with palpable affection, he identifies Peploe's Palm Trees, Antibes as his favourite in Kirkcaldy's collection. Now he says: "The dark sky and dark sea and the light bit in between, that's what I notice."

Abstract art is another dislike. "It leaves me absolutely dead. I don't know what to do with it. I need to see somebody doing something, and I also need to see evidence of the artistry. In abstract art, I can't see the technique, the talent. I know I'll get hammered for saying that."

I kid him that we can almost hear the words "pot, kettle, black" in the wind whipping around our ears. But since people are always going to slag him, why not speak his mind?

Given that his paintings are suffused with nostalgic longing – not only his models' clothes, but also their surroundings feel retro – I'm guessing he'd use a time machine to go back, rather than forward? I'm hoping to learn why history appeals to him, but Vettriano takes it another way.

"You're entirely right, I'd go backwards. It's to do with women. I'm an unashamed lover of vintage underwear and clothing, and the whole burlesque thing. I've got this theory that the period when you move into puberty, then the things that are happening around you visually, at that time, are the things that tend to stay with you. I started to get sexually aware at ten."

Local working girls captured his imagination, but he was equally admiring of schoolmates and his mum's friends. He says: "I could spend the whole day rolling around on the carpet pretending I'd lost a pencil or something, to try and look up their skirts. But that's what young people do! When you write that, try to make me sound like I'm slightly intelligent."

There's no need to try; it all sounds normal to me. I presume, then, he's a fan of Mad Men? "I have both series at home (on DVD] and I usually close the blinds and get some food in and that's me for the weekend," he jokes. "Some of the underwear and outerwear – for the men and the women – it's absolutely amazing. In a time machine, I'd go back to the Mad Men period. What I've realised is that I want that era – I don't like those really old stockings, I like that period just before tights were invented."

I give up. Sex it is. Was he a mummy's boy? "Not particularly, no. I don't know quite where the interest in sex comes from. But it certainly emerged pretty early. And it's hung on pretty late!"

We arrive at the exhibition, which features some of Vettriano's brightest, most colourful work yet, a testament to time spent in the south of France, Monaco and Italy. Each picture reminds him of a fresh anecdote about a flirtation or a fling. I wonder if the emphasis on sex isn't a variation on "I can drink eight pints", and whether a man who evaluates every woman in terms of her sexual potential, can really see or connect with a woman.

I feel wistful as we drive off. Not for my lost bet, but for Vettriano, who seems so alone.

Days of Wine and Roses is at Kirkcaldy Museum & Art Gallery from tomorrow until 2 May. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.fifedirect.org.uk/museums or call 01592 583213. There will be a book signing on Sunday from 2:15-3:30pm.