A brush with the art world

So he’s avoided it, and on the way helped to create the powerful Vettriano image: that his art, and his success have been created around the darkness of a life alone, lived purely on his own terms. And, of course, notoriously, those terms eschew the conventional and centre instead around the most basic human urge of sex. There is, in fact, a lot more to Jack Vettriano the commercial commodity than just his art. The whole impression of a no-holds-barred lifestyle has added to his huge fanbase and his media appeal, as has his working-class background and the well documented rubbishing of his work by the art establishment. There aren’t many living, breathing celebrity artists, but 51-year-old Vettriano is one.

Of all the painters working in Britain today, he is perhaps the most instantly recognisable to an audience usually unenthralled by fine art. If the name goes unrecognised, you simply have to cite one image - an elegantly clad couple dancing on a windblown beach, watched by a bowler-hatted figure clutching an umbrella - and, oh yeah - everyone knows Jack Vettriano.Famously, that painting, The Singing Butler, is the best-selling fine art print in the UK, and possibly in the world, leaving Monet and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers behind in the dust, and reputedly netting the artist a quarter of a million pounds a year. The second best-selling print, The Billy Boys, is also Vettriano’s, and postcards and greetings cards featuring his work walk out of the shops.

The British public really seem to love Vettriano, perhaps above any other living artist. Yet - another famous part of his box office appeal - the arts establishment emphatically does not. No gallery outside Kirkcaldy will hang his work; no critic has gone on the record to do anything other than denigrate or patronise it.

He seems to have become, in Scotland at least, the personification of the split between the public’s taste in art and that of the experts: the old dilemma of what to trust, your own eyes or someone else’s expertise. This has given Vettriano the extra media sexiness of the outsider, the underdog against the snobbishness of the establishment. He is now, in the words of one tabloid: ‘The People’s Painter’: him and us against the art world.

Today, the People’s Painter is part of the way through a week in Scotland to participate in a fashion show at St Andrews University - an institution which has, uniquely, accepted his contribution to Scottish art with an honorary degree.

He meets me outside his Kirkcaldy home, having talked me, and later the photographer, through the complications of the town’s road system on his mobile phone, like a very patient air traffic controller guiding in disabled aircraft. The man himself, for all the image of the artist living life on the edges of convention, is almost defiantly unbohemian and low-key.

He’s tall, he looks fit though he denies it, and speaks very quietly, his accent unvarnished Fife. Later, when the TV crew arrives, he makes coffee and produces chocolate biscuits out of a packet, careful to learn everyone’s name and shake everyone’s hand. He’s very charming, very likeable, there seem to be no pretensions. At first meeting he’s the kind of bloke you might meet at the bus-stop or in the pub: completely ordinary; one of us.

But, of course, he’s not. For a start there’s what could fairly be described as his obsession: women, and what he believes makes the world go round. His art, though never exactly sweet, has become more darkly - critics say seedily - erotic as the years have progressed. He is, he believes, simply articulating what’s in all of us - what now, if he’s to be believed, all but guides his own life.

"When I first started to paint there wasn’t a real focus there, and then I started to think about what we’re actually like as human beings, and how we can cheat and lie, and the whole sort of Bill Clinton thing how he could almost bring a government down because he wanted a quickie, I mean, everyone’s at it. And it is that powerful a force, that it does drive people to destruction, because some people cannot handle it; and it’s those sort of people I identify with."

Vettriano says his work is autobiographical, born from his experience of prostitutes and brief affairs and lapdancing clubs; he can’t, he claims, resist temptation. It’s hard to tell how much is dark and dangerous image and how much is real - but there’s an air of polite, subtle flirtation about him, the half-hopeful confidence of the true womaniser which suggests he does, to an extent at least, live the dream.

Then there’s his wealth: his home is jaw-droppingly impressive, furnished impeccably, and this is only one of his houses. The other is in one of the most expensive parts of London. His art, and, in particular, all those cards and prints, have made him very rich, but the use of prints to gain success and the ubiquity of the images haven’t helped his status in an art world which accuses him of producing ‘posters’ and ‘shopping mall art’; such overt commercialism is not politically a good move.

But Vettriano is frank about his reasoning, as he seems to be frank about everything. "Well you know, you run the risk of the wrath of the establishment by being popular, but at the same time why shouldn’t people have an image for 10 when they don’t have a lot of money to spend? And anyway, I own the copyright of my work until 75 years after my death and then it’s a free for all and you think - well why shouldn’t I benefit from it now?

"What would Van Gogh have done, what would Monet have done if they had had the opportunity? Instead of that what you get is, the marketplace is flooded with their stuff and they’re not earning a penny from it."

He’s startlingly businesslike about his art, perhaps because of how he came to it. His background is all part of the legend. He was brought up in the mining village of Methilhill, the son of a miner. The family had little money and he had few aspirations. He left school early with no qualifications, anxious, he says, to get to the real business of life and chasing women."I was much brighter than I put on at school. I mean at school I purposely did badly because I didn’t want to have to go to university and sit with a bunch of pansies, I wanted to grow up in the town I loved, where it was about macho men and hard men. That’s the kind of narrow existence that still exists today in pockets around Scotland, you know, who wants to study when you can be out there supporting your football team and chasing sex? But having done that from the age of 15 through to 21, I could see that something had to happen."

That ‘something’ is generally held to be the gift of a paintbox from a girlfriend on his 21st birthday, but that seems to have been part of a wider epiphany. He went to night school, got qualifications then jobs in management and did quite well. But bubbling away in the background was the hobby that grew and grew - part of his self development. He’d always been good at art at school, and now he taught himself to paint, on and off, copying every image he could get his hands on. In his mid-30s he began to appreciate his own potential and develop his own style.

The images he produced have been described as loosely inspired by film noir, a world where men and women dressed formally, the men in sharp suits and hats, the women in the elegant dresses of the 1940s and 1950s. Vettriano says it was partly inspiration from cinema, partly from the people he saw around him as a child, but perhaps mainly a sensual thing.

"I’ve always loved women who dress as women, you know, pure femininity." His voice dips conspiratorially. "When you know a woman’s wearing stockings there’s no sort of question about it, and I love that world where there’s a strict division between men and women. If you were painting contemporary life now, man and woman, from the back, you can’t tell the difference. It was a way of getting the message across very purely and simply."

Whatever the inspiration, to say it struck a chord is a massive understatement. Everyone has a theory as to why it has the appeal that it does. The artist’s agent, Tom Hewitt, at the Portland Gallery in London, believes it’s engagement. "When I first saw Jack’s work it hit home hard. I’d simply never encountered a better narrative artist.

"He just sets the scene better than anyone else, allows you to develop the story in your own head. Really good narrative painting has that engagement between the painting and the viewer - it makes the whole experience personal and that creates involvement."

Ricky Demarco, another arts outsider, cites the power of nostalgia. "I think what he’s done is paint the extraordinary influence of cinema on a certain generation of Scots, which is a hell of an achievement. There was a longing in people’s hearts not just to live in Scotland, but in Paris and New York, and you could dream your dreams in the cinema. He’s put these dreams in the medium of paint."

The response to Vettriano’s work continues to be extraordinary. Tom Hewitt says he hasn’t seen a British artist in 20 years who’s had the level of support Vettriano inspires across such a broad spectrum of the population. "It crosses ethnic, social, educational, financial divides," he says.

Indeed, as much as the prints are hung in living rooms up and down Britain, the originals are hung in the homes of the rich and famous. And they have to be rich - an original could set you back between 20,000 and 50,000, yet every exhibition is sold out before it opens. Terence Conran, Jack Nicholson and Tim Rice have been among Vettriano’s patrons; Raymond Blanc has just themed a suite of rooms at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons around the artist’s work as "a study of male sensuality, and a reflection of everything that the British try to hide".

Vettriano is quietly thrilled by it all, by the adulatory e-mails that pour into the Portland every day from around the world, by the passionate adherence of his fans. But for all that, the success and the money and the admiration, the thing Vettriano cannot have, the thing he wants, is the approbation of his peers.

This year Scotland will send the first national presentation of art from this country to the prestigious, century-old Venice Biennale arts festival. The artists chosen to represent Scotland are viewed by the Scottish Arts Council as providing the image they want for the nation’s art. Vettriano, needless to say, is not among them. Amanda Catto of the SAC is publicly diplomatic. "I don’t see Jack Vettriano’s work as unique or groundbreaking or breaking the mould in any way. In an international context we want to be seen as making a particular contribution, have strong voices, great thoughts." Enough said.

Despite his enormous popularity, the National Galleries will not purchase any of Vettriano’s work, and the bulk of the arts world seems completely behind the policy. Mills and Boon romances are popular, they say, but that doesn’t make them good literature. National collections have to understand the cultural significance and long term value of art; picking stuff that’s significant and important is, by its nature, not a populist act.

Critics may be more cautious now about openly deriding Vettriano’s abilities, but in private they’re still vitriolic. "You don’t have to look very hard to see how bad his paintings are," says one - previously outspoken but asking now not to be named.

"He’s just a bad artist. His women don’t have any anatomy, you can tell he hasn’t been taught to draw figures. As for being self-taught, well, Constable said, ‘The self-taught artist is one taught by a very ignorant person.’"

A female critic cites her problem with how he portrays women. Another expresses the belief that the Vettriano bubble will burst within 10 years. But none of them wants to take on the People’s Painter publicly any more. They know, says Vettriano, that people don’t like being told their taste is crap. Vettriano, for his part, seems past the stage of diplomacy with any of them. "Lately I’ve been thinking it’s to do with very graphic heterosexual behaviour, and that’s never gone down well in Scotland. Someone said to me if you’d painted homosexual sex that would be all right with the arts establishment - there’s something acceptable and poetic about that. But a homosexual curator isn’t going to want to buy heterosexual work. It will do nothing for him, he won’t like it, and mine is in your face. In Scotland, a man and woman just trying to get the drawers off each other, well we do love to do it, but we don’t want to see it."

As for the policies of the National Galleries: "We’ve all been through the National Galleries, particularly the National Gallery of Modern Art and seen stuff we can’t stand. But they’re responsible for spending our money and we don’t have a say. What happened to accountability? Clifford [National Galleries director Sir Timothy Clifford] is looking for 8m to buy a Titian. Who the f*** cares about Titian really, other than them? They’re all just sitting in committee meetings talking horseshit. The art world is not about art. It’s about these bastards and their pensions."

I cite to him the comments of the female critic, her dislike of his portrayal of female sexuality. "Well that argument is put up by women who don’t like sex very much. She needs to get out more. I portray women wielding sexual power. If you allow yourself to be drawn into my work, then you will be drawn in. But then there are all those sort of John Knoxes in Scotland. Women who enjoy their own sexuality, sexy people, love my work. "

So back, inevitably, we come to women and the kind of life he leads, the temptations. His largest fanbase is female and some seem mesmerised by the Vettriano image. I witnessed it myself on a cold, rainy evening in Inverurie, at a gallery event held by friends of Vettriano in which the sexual undercurrents emanating from some female fans who’d travelled miles to see him were almost unnerving.At the end, though, he says his most controversial work has a kind of moral message, that the people he portrays in sleazy bars and lapdancing clubs are racing toward their own destruction, on the road to nowhere. But isn’t he happily rattling along that road himself, I ask? "No," he says, but adds: "I wouldn’t say I was happy. The highs are high and the lows are extremely low."

He says he suspects his attitude may be partly a product of his success: "I’ve always been slightly discontented, even when things are going well, but I think the trap I’m in is that I’m now scared of a domestic arrangement that could affect my creativity. I feel I work best when I’m emotionally handicapped."

Then as I’m preparing to leave, and he’s telling me about his next exhibition, next year, how he can work fast because he learned to paint while he was also trying to pay a mortgage, he lets slip that there may at last be someone special in his life. It turns everything he’s told me, the image I had of his life, on its head. It seems in some ways more of a challenge for him than getting his work hung in the National Galleries.