Jack Vettriano / Unreal Rooms

Jack Vettriano, Mad Dogs

Jack Vettriano

Unreal Rooms

1 JULY 2017, 

EMANUELA BORGATTA DUNNETT

Why are we able to feel nostalgia for a world we have never visited nor known, in front of Jack Vettriano’s paintings? Why do we feel as strangers - yet accomplices - in front of the men and women populating his works? These are key questions to understand the Scottish painter’s success, a painter who has managed to become one of the most followed artist of contemporary painting, all over the world. First, we need to focus our attention on the use of the light: unprecedented in the way he uses to play with the darkness which characterises all his works: faces in half light, thoughtful, facing a crossroad where they are asked to state their position. The bodies are captured at the beginning of an action, the consequences of which are unknown: deceitful gazes, arms meeting in secret relationships. 

 

Jack Vettriano: ‘His paintings are like a double cheeseburger in a greasy wrapper’

This article is more than 8 months old

The Scot painted singing butlers, ‘broads’ in bras and tough guys in suits, in works critics found lurid, chintzy, devoid of irony and often sexist. But they were also hugely popular – showing the power of ‘I get it’ art

Eddie Frankel

In 1992, Jack Vettriano’s painting The Singing Butler was rejected by the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Anyone who has seen some of the dross picked for display in the RA’s annual open submission collision of amateur artists and big stars in recent decades will be thinking: “Ouch, must’ve been a real dud.” But The Singing Butler not only wasn’t a dud, it went on to become one of the most ubiquitous and – whisper it – iconic British paintings since the second world war.

Banksy's 'Balloon Girl' beats paintings by Constable and Turner to be named Britain's favourite artwork

Balloon Girl
2002
by Banksy

Banksy's 'Balloon Girl' beats paintings by Constable and Turner to be named Britain's favourite artwork

Album covers for the Beatles, Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols also feature among top 20

Katie Archer
Tuesday 25 July 2017 14:16 BST

Graffiti artist Banksy has beaten the likes of Turner and Constable in a poll of the nation’s favourite artwork.

His famous 2002 daubing on the wall of a Shoreditch shop, Balloon Girl, came top of a list of British art preferred by 2,000 people who were given a shortlist drawn up by arts editors and writers to choose from.

Jack Vettriano / Men and Women II

Jack Vettriano

(1951)

MEN AND WOMEN II

Jack Vettriano I / Men and Women I

Jack Vettriano

Men and Women I

Jack Vettriano© – Dancer For Money

Jack Vettriano© – Dancer in Emerald

Jack Vettriano / Women

WOMEN

by Jack Vettriano 

1951

Jack Vettriano / The Singing Butler Did It

 

The Singing Butler Did It

Critics say Jack Vettriano paints brainless erotica. But ever since Vettriano’s 1992 canvas The Singing Butler became Britain’s best-selling image, ubiquitous on posters, calendars, and jigsaw puzzles, the 60-year-old former coal miner has been creating an art world of his own.

BY AMY FINE COLLINS

JUNE 28, 2012

The woman’s feet are bare, though her arms are covered in opera-length gloves. She turns away from us, displaying a shapely back, draped in a slim red ball gown. Her right hip tilts toward her male partner, attired in a tuxedo and evening pumps. The well-dressed couple seems to have escaped from a party, or formed a two-person one of their own, as they are dancing, incongruously, on a beach, whose smooth wet sand reflects her toes and his trousers. The horizon is low and the sky foggy. As this setting is apparently somewhere in the British Isles, the glamorous pair is not alone. They are attended by two retainers, a maid for her and a butler for him, each of whom protectively holds an umbrella aloft against the threatening weather. The scene possibly violates the classical unity of time; the servants’ uniforms seem anachronistic, but the woman’s tall, trim body type is contemporary.

Jack Vettriano

Jack Vettriano: I paint the things closest to me.. women

Britain's most popular artist is not a man to court headlines.

BY MIRROR
00:00, 8 OCT 2010
UPDATED 07:09, 27 JAN 2012

You won't find him drunkenly arguing on TV arts shows a la Tracey Emin, shoving dead animals into formaldehyde like Damien Hirst, or inviting us, as Antony Gormley did, to pose beneath the pigeons on a plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Jack Vettriano / The Marmite of the Art World?

 

Jack Vettriano

The Marmite of the Art World?

A Retrospective

Reviewed by David Blane

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum,  Glasgow 

21 September 2013–23 February 2014 

As a young man, Jack Hoggan (as he was then) would fabricate excuses for leaving work to visit Kelvingrove and be inspired by great art like Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross, and works by the Impressionists and the Glasgow Boys. It is fitting that this major exhibition of his work, the first in Scotland outside of his native Fife, should bring him back to Kelvingrove some 30 years later.