Lovers and Other Strangers: Paintings by Jack Vettriano

New
Paperback
2002
$18.62

The painter Jack Vettriano emerged form the unlikely background of the Scottish coalfields - unknown and untutored - and has seen his canvases hung in the Royal Scottish Academy. His first exhibition sold out, as did the second and he has since become Scotland's most successful contemporary artist. Vettriano's images are neo-realist - real in the sense that he portrays recognizable people in believable situations, yet heightened to that level of dramatic or romantic intensity which fuelled the fiction of the Hollywood dream factory or the novels of Raymond Chandler or F. Scott Fitzgerald. They are tales without text, storyboards about love and lust, possession and longing, pursuit and conquest. He seems to understand perfectly the stylish sexiness and intrigue that occurs when high life and low life collide. His men are predators, gamblers - hard-edged but possibly soft-centred, Bogartian in period and attitude. His women are vulnerable, pliable, probably playthings if the price is right. And beyond the implied narrative of his paintings there is a curious remembrance of times past and lost, of squandered youth on blissful beaches. Critics have linked Vettriano with the bleak paintings of Hopper, the sleazy photographs of Brassai, yet he is unique, identifiable at fifty yards. Anthony Quinn has written an elegant biographical portrait of the man from childhood to present, encompassing his family, schooling and career as well as pausing at significant moments in his career.

Synopsis

The painter Jack Vettriano emerged form the unlikely background of the Scottish coalfields - unknown and untutored - and has seen his canvases hung in the Royal Scottish Academy. His first exhibition sold out, as did the second and he has since become Scotland's most successful contemporary artist. Vettriano's images are neo-realist - real in the sense that he portrays recognizable people in believable situations, yet heightened to that level of dramatic or romantic intensity which fuelled the fiction of the Hollywood dream factory or the novels of Raymond Chandler or F. Scott Fitzgerald. They are tales without text, storyboards about love and lust, possession and longing, pursuit and conquest. He seems to understand perfectly the stylish sexiness and intrigue that occurs when high life and low life collide. His men are predators, gamblers - hard-edged but possibly soft-centred, Bogartian in period and attitude. His women are vulnerable, pliable, probably playthings if the price is right. And beyond the implied narrative of his paintings there is a curious remembrance of times past and lost, of squandered youth on blissful beaches. Critics have linked Vettriano with the bleak paintings of Hopper, the sleazy photographs of Brassai, yet he is unique, identifiable at fifty yards. Anthony Quinn has written an elegant biographical portrait of the man from childhood to present, encompassing his family, schooling and career as well as pausing at significant moments in his career.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 160
Edition: 1
Publisher: Pavilion
Published: 11 Jul 2002
ISBN 10: 1862056307
ISBN 13: 9781862056305
Book Overview: Jack Vettriano is Scotland's best-known and most successful contemporary artist A perfect Valentine's gift Over 32,000 copies of the paperback sold since publication

Media Reviews

The text is intriguing - less biography than apology, an attempt to dismiss the mass of political opinion with a success story and include Vettriano in the cultural mainstream (The Glasgow Herald)

Author Bio

Jack Vettriano is entirely self-taught. A Scotsman of Italian descent, he left school at sixteen to become a mining engineer working down the Fife coalfields. For his twenty-first birthday a girlfriend gave him a set of watercolour paints and from then on, he spent much of his spare time teaching himself to paint. His first solo exhibition in Edinburgh was a sell-out and since then he has had solo exhibitions in London, Hong Kong and New York. Over the last twenty years, interest in Vettriano's work has grown consistently. Vettriano's best known painting, The Singing Butler, was sold at Sotheby's for close to GBP750,000. He was awarded an OBE for Services to the Visual Arts. In 2013, a major twenty year Retrospective exhibition of Vettriano's work was staged at Kelvingrove art Gallery and Musuem in Glasgow. He lives in Edinburgh.