Who is Jack Vettriano

Q. Who is Jack Vettriano

A. Born in Scotland in 1951 of Italian parents, Jack Vettriano left school at sixteen to become a mining engineer in the local coalfields. A friend gave him a set of watercolour paints for his twenty-first birthday and, from then on, he spent much of his spare time teaching himself to paint, finding inspiration in the collection of 19th- and 20th-century Scottish paintings in his local gallery, the Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery.

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It was fourteen years before Vettriano felt ready to show any of his work in public. In 1989 he offered two works to the Royal Scottish Academy's annual exhibition; both were accepted and sold on the first day. The success at the Academy led to a joint show during the 1991 Edinburgh festival at the Solstice Gallery. In 1992, the three paintings which he entered for the prestigious Summer Exhibition at London's Royal Academy were received with equal enthusiasm, and later in the same year his first solo exhibition was a sell-out.

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Q. No formal training

A. None, which is pretty unusual for a major painter.

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Q. So, he's successful

A. Very. His popularity stems from a combination of technical skill combined with a populist realism and sly humour, which appeals to a broad range of people. There's no deliberately obscure element in his work.

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Throughout the 1990s interest has grown rapidly. There have been sell-out solo exhibitions in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong and Johannesburg. In November 1999 Vettriano's work was shown for the first time in New York. Fifty collectors from the UK flew out for the opening night and all twenty paintings on show were sold within one hour.

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Q. And his work

A. His paintings hint at stories of seduction and betrayal in a style that has been compared to some of the great modern realist painters and the Hungarian photographer Brassa� (1899-1984), whose best-known work are his dramatic photographs of Paris at night. The two artists with whom he is most frequently compared are the British Impressionist Walter Sickert (1860-1942) and the American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Hopper's work, which features realistic depictions of everyday urban scenes designed to shock the viewer into recognition of the strangeness of the familiar - you may have seen his famous painting Nighthawks, which depicts one of those glorious chrome-clad diners at night - especially finds a resonance in Vettriano's paintings.

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Q. Can you name any

A. Dance Me To the End of Love - shades of the Leonard Cohen song - Bluebird at Bonneville, Cocktails and Broken Hearts and Amateur Philosophers. If you want to take a look at any of these go to http://www.portlandgallery.com/index.phtml page=jackvettriano_posters

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Q. Where can his work be found

A. Reproductions of his work are all over the place as they lend themselves well to reproduction as greetings cards and posters. In fact in 2000-01 the two best-selling posters in the UK have been Vettriano paintings, and over half a million have been sold to date.

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As for originals, his paintings feature in many private, corporate and public collections worldwide. He's handled by the Portland Gallery in London, and they'll be mounting a show of his work in June 2002.

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By Simon Smith