Painting a dark picture

TWO record-breaking sales in a matter of days have made this a very good week for Jack Vettriano, one of the very few millionaire artists in the world. On Monday, it was reported that one of his paintings, The Red Room had fetched a hefty £34,000 at an Edinburgh auctioneers. By close of play on Thursday, another, The City Cafe, had sold for £10,000 more.

Nice work if you can get it, and Vettriano has no shortage of offers. This is an artist who - like Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin - commands attention from inside and outside the art world, whose work is loved and loathed in equal measure by rich men, poor men, beggermen and (thieves notwithstanding) art critics.

No sunken-cheeked dauber exiled to his garret, he has exhibited - as the blurb on those ubiquitous Vettriano greeting cards reminds us - in London, Paris and Hong Kong. And if he has never found a place in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, or any other public institution (except the Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery), he is collected by the rich and famous. Jack Nicholson, Terence Conran, Raymond Blanc, Robbie Coltrane and Gary Rhodes line up on his list of admirers.

If the establishment won’t have him at least the public have another way of making a choice, and they do so in their droves. Whatever heights they reached this week, sales of his original artworks form only a fraction of Vettriano’s income.

More than 500,000 posters of his paintings already have been sold, the majority in Britain, the US and Japan. The Singing Butler is the best-selling fine-art print in the UK, and the licensing agreement for this image alone earns its painter 250,000 in royalties each year. For good measure, above brilliant images of waterlilies by Monet or sunflowers by Van Gogh, No2 in the poster hit parade is Mad Dogs, another instantly recognisable work from Vettriano.

Yet the critics sniff. Pursued by a tabloid newspaper this week for an opinion on the people’s painter, the director of the National Galleries of Scotland, Sir Timothy Clifford, was unavailable for comment.

In lieu of a new disparaging opinion, The Scotsman’s art critic, Duncan McMillan, was cited - he once compared Vettriano’s paintings to "bonkbuster" fiction - along with Sandy Moffatt of Glasgow School of Art, who concurred. "Badly conceived soft porn," he called it.

Not everyone agrees. In the 1980s, Vettriano was turned away as a would-be mature student from the Edinburgh College of Art; these days, its visiting professor, David Mach, is upbeat about his fellow artist.

"Here is a man who paints well," says Mach, "who has been very successful, who is making a mint, and who is showing all over the place - and yet the art world is really snotty about him.

"I like some of his stuff, not all of it - but it’s like other artists, I don’t like all their work either. And I’m astounded at the successes of it. The man’s a great success story, yet every time I hear someone talk about Jack Vettriano, it’s to put the guy down. I’m absolutely sick to my stomach about that."

A comparison between the two artists can be instructive. They were born and brought up a matter of a few hundred yards apart, in Methil, Fife. Vettriano is two and a half years older - a lifetime at school age, and he never met Mach.

Hack psychologists might draw attention to their shared working-class backgrounds - the sons and grandsons of immigrant families - and the narrow, confined worlds they inhabited in the shadow of the coal bings. Mach himself would draw attention to the quality of light along the Fife beaches; it informs his work as much as it bathes Vettriano’s weird tableaux of butlers, red dresses, stiletto heels and hats. Then there is a certain common theme the two often address in their work.

Their views of women may be different - Mach’s bulging, voluptuous sculptures and Vettriano’s slinky half-clad vamps, open for assessment from calculating males - but both artists ooze sex by the bucketload. Whatever essence inspired the pair of them, the Fife Tourist Board should bottle it.

IT IS nearly 51 years since Jack Hoggan was born, the second son of Charlotte and William Hoggan, a miner. His maternal grandfather, Peter Vettriano, an Italian, was one of the first people to encourage the boy to draw, and 30 years later Jack would honour the debt by taking his grandfather’s name. These days, the artist, undeniably vain, is tall and swarthy, dark and forbidding. "Vettriano" fits better than "Hoggan". "I’ve got to admit, it’s a great name," he says.

Vettriano was an idler at school and left at 15 for a job in the Michael colliery, though he admits his contribution was little more than "smoking and skiving". Subsequently, he loafed his way through a series of dead-end jobs. He worked a door-to-door beat in Darlington; at a low-level post in personnel; as a "management consultant" in Bahrain; for the Manpower Services Commission; and latterly for a newspaper distribution company.

By then, though, he was digging a tunnel out of his humdrum world. For his 21st birthday, Vettriano’s then girlfriend, Ruth McIntosh, gave him a box of watercolours. He tried painting, enjoyed it and, with no training, began to copy everything from Renaissance masterpieces to the best of Salvador Dali.

Through the 1980s, he developed his style, those hats and glamorous women, those faceless people and their empty moments - all set against Scottish beaches, Lang Toun dance halls and Edinburgh bar interiors.

In 1988 came one of the almost mythical moments of Vettriano’s career: he had two paintings accepted for the Royal Scottish Academy exhibition. Both Model in a White Slip and Saturday Night sold within hours of going on display.

Over the following years, his work became increasingly popular; he was championed by W Gordon Smith, the critic of Scotland on Sunday, and in 1993 he struck up a partnership with Tom Hewlett of London’s Portland Gallery. The gallery still represents him, selling originals and licensing posters and cards all over the world.

"What attracted me is the narrative quality of his work," says Mr Hewlett. "You see a picture and you automatically have your own interpretation of what is happening and what is about to happen. It’s like reading a book, your mind puts together the scene as described by the author. That is the strength of Jack’s work - it enables the viewer to engage with the painting and then develop it.

"Very few people can do that well. When I saw his work it was the first time I have seen it done that well ever, and I knew if I could see it, others would."

THESE days there appears to be a darker side to Vettriano’s work. Forget the airy beaches of the past, his recent pictures are often dark interiors, his women are in greater states of undress and more victimised by the men who stand coldly weighing them up.

It is tempting, as a critic might, to ascribe this trend to his personal life. An 11-year marriage to Gail Cormack failed shortly after his professional career in art began to take off; he is now distant from his stepdaughter. Since the marriage ended, there have been, he concedes, no serious relationships, but a string of affairs and just a whiff of scandal about the man. In 1999, the tabloids had him stalking an Edinburgh woman. When the Spectator repeated the allegations, the artist called his lawyers in, and the magazine withdrew.

Then, of course, there are the critics and that Scottish art establishment, which is held to have forced Vettriano to move four years ago from his Edinburgh flat to another in Chelsea and the heart of the London art world. He denies he was forced out of Scotland and went instead in search of anonymity. Whatever the truth, the move didn’t stop the badmouthing. Some voices have described his paintings as flat or soulless and "no more than colouring-in". The level of vitriol is astonishing.

If money and success soften the blow a least a little, it is plain that Vettriano craves acceptance by the art establishment. He says: "Show me the artist who does not want to be recognised by his peers, and I will show you a liar."

There are voices who support him. The novelist AL Kennedy has described his critics as idiots, and for every critic who says Vettriano is poor copyist there’s a working artist to compare his work favourably with the American realist painter Edward Hopper.

And then there is David Mach, who has his own view of the critics who write off Jack Vettriano. It’s plain jealousy, he says.

"His work cuts right through all their stuff; you have layers of snobbery in the art world which, as an artist, you have to work through. He does this brilliant bypass. They’re bothered by that, because they have no power over somebody like that. His work bulldozes them flat.

"They want to put him down, they can’t wait for him to fail; but he’s not going to. He’s absolutely not going to, so good luck to him.

"If I was an American I would say I was proud of Jack Vettriano, but we don’t have that here in Britain. We don’t talk like that about people like Jack."

Factfile

Jack Vettriano was born plain Jack Hoggan, a miner’s son from Methil in Fife.

Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery with its collection of Scottish colourists inspired the painter; it is the only public art gallery in Britain to own one of Vettriano’s works.

In 1999, Vettriano’s work was shown at the International 20th Century Arts Fair in New York. All 20 paintings were sold within an hour of the opening.

Celebrity restaurateurs Terence Conran, Gary Rhodes and Raymond Blanc have all invested in paintings by Vettriano. So has "Britain’s least funny comic", Jim Davidson.

Four original Vettrianos were sold in Britain this week to a value of 100,000. The figure represents a tiny fraction of the sum the artist earns from reproductions of his work.