|
Artistic figures...
Jack
Vettriano
 Born in Scotland in 1951, Vettriano left school at sixteen to become a mining engineer in the local 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. The local art gallery, The Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery, with its renowned collection of 19th and 20th century Scottish paintings, was particularly inspirational.
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 following year, an equally enthusiastic reaction greeted the three paintings, which he entered for the prestigious Summer Exhibition at London’s Royal Academy.
 In the last nine years interest in, and desire for his work, has grown rapidly. There have been sellout solo exhibitions in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong and Johannesburg. In November 1999, Vettriano’s work was shown for the first time in New York, when twenty paintings were displayed at The International 20th Century Arts Fair at The Armory. Fifty collectors from the UK flew out for the opening night of the Fair and all twenty paintings were sold out within an hour of the opening.
 In March 2000 BBC Scotland produced a half-hour documentary about Vettriano for their Arts Series EX-S; aired initially in Scotland only, the documentary is likely to be repeated nationally in the future.
Aside from his exhibitions, Vettriano has acquired a vast following of fans through the posters and prints of his paintings that are distributed worldwide. This year the two best selling art posters in Britain are both Vettriano images. To date, more than 500,000 posters of Vettriano’s paintings have sold worldwide.
 Before 1989 he had never exhibited any paintings. But when he did, they sold immediately. Jack Vettriano has risen from the obscurity of the coalfields in Fife, where he was a mining engineer, to be Britain's most popular narrative painter. All of his exhibitions sell out within a matter of minutes of opening time; and such is his universal fame that during a stay in New York for an exhibition of his work he was followed around by a film crew.
Such is the demand that to be lucky enough to own one of his highly prized original paintings meant a long wait (apparently 200 people are in a waiting list for his work).
Source:
http://www.vettriano-art.com
| 
Home
