Dimensions
228 x 290 x 13mm
The painter Jack Vettriano emerged from the unlikely background of the Scottish coalfields - unknown and untutored - and has seen his canvasses hung in the Royal Scottish Academy. His first exhibition sold out, as did his 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 recognisable 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 and 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.
