Jack Vettriano

The Scottish painter, Jack Vettriano is a very popular modern artist, with almost as many critics as admirers. perhaps his most famous painting is The Singing Butler, which shows an elegant couple dancing on a very wet beach either at dawn or sunset, with a maid and a butler holding umbrellas over them. The images are realistic, the setting is slightly surreal, it’s romantic, dream-like, sexy and strange… as are many of his pictures. He is criticised for being simplistic, for painting-by-numbers, for just ‘colouring in’…. you either like him or you really, really don’t. He is criticised for being popular, he is criticised for copying from other images, he is, Jonathan Jones of the Guardian said “not an artist. His texture less, brainless corpses of paintings just happen to be popular.” Whoa, that is some criticism.

http://http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2005/oct/05/1

Have a look at his website and see what you think if you don’t know Vettriano already:

http://www.jackvettriano.com/

I do like his work, and my favourite picture is of a group of people in evening dress on a beach, a favourite setting, two men in their shirt sleeves and a woman in a short red dress. She is crouching down looking into a pool and one of the men is bending over also looking; the other man is turned away, looking out of the frame smoking a cigarette. It is called ‘Narcissistic Bathers’ which suggests that maybe she is looking at her reflection.

http://http://art-et-cancrelats.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/jack-vettriano.html

If you’ve read my blog at all you probably realise that I am driven by imagination, so looking at art is all about what I imagine, what reaction it provokes in terms of a creative response. I’m not suggesting Vettriano is a great painter in terms of artistic merit, no, Jonathan Jones of the Guardian I don’t think he is as good as Titian, he obviously isn’t. I’m just expressing my personal opinion… I like his work!