Jack Vettriano's homecoming

23/12/2009

Scots art legend talks trams, yachts, Fife... and sex (of course)

By Vicky Davidson

FOR a man who has made his fortune dwelling on the dark side of passion, spending loose afternoons “knee-deep in tears”, Jack Vettriano is remarkably jovial company today.

His sense of humour may be as black as the Methil coal pits he descended after he left the high school gates aged 15. But he frequently unleashes his raspy, smoke-roughened chortle as he ponders whether he discovered Leonard Cohen “too early” – the laureate of the seedy tryst leading him into a life of doomed romance which has suffused his art ever since – and recalls one outlandish story that went round about him marrying Faye Dunaway and running off to Canada.

Fifer Vettriano’s work hangs on more walls than any other living artist, including those of Jack Nicholson, Sir Tim Rice and Sir Alex Ferguson. It’s estimated prints of his iconic paintings, such as his ubiquitous signature portrait The Singing Butler, generate up to half a million quid a year in royalties; and having recently set up his own company, cutely titled Heartbreak Publishing, he’s not only set to have more control over his work but, he says, greater freedom to deviate from what’s expected of him, too.

Currently, he is working on a brand new set of paintings, of trams in Milan, which will be unveiled to the public for the first time in Kirkcaldy next March, at his new exhibition, Days of Wine and Roses, which then shows in London and Milan.

Whilst in Italy’s style capital, he discovered it still has its its original trams from the ’40s and ’50s running. “They’re very well maintained, exceptionally well-built, I thought they were so romantic,” he says. “They’re so glamorous. I thought I would like to do a series of tram paintings.”

While trams sound prosaically untrue to form for Vettriano, there is a sexed-up twist, of course. He looked up a journalist from Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, and – after a date at La Scala and dinner, naturally – she arranged for him to get access to the tram depot.

 “She was a lovely girl, and has a decent wardrobe full of vintage clothing. So we spent the day taking photographs in the depot, and that’s what I’m working on. I’m very pleased with them.”

Holed up in his Knightsbridge studio, audio wallpaper wafts out of the wireless tuned to an oldies station playing ’60s, ’70s and ’80s music, “stuff which your mind can drift away on,” while he paints. But if I’m going to sit and listen to music I’m stuck in the land of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. Slit your wrists time.”

His last set of paintings, which will also get their first UK airing in Kirkcaldy, took him to another chic European destination – Monaco – where he was commissioned to create a series of paintings for the principality’s yacht club, specifically to celebrate the centenary of their flagship vessel, the Tuiga, which was built at Fairlie, on the Ayrshire coast, by William Fife, in 1909. While he enjoyed the challenge – and spending time in sunny Monaco while most artists “are stuck down the end of Berwick Pier”, he’s happy not to paint yachts again. “It was an interesting challenge and the paintings turned out great.” Adorned, bien sur, with gorgeous women draped across the yacht.

The new exhibition will feature nine or 10 paintings from the Monaco set, six or seven with trams, and up to 10 of “what you might call my ‘original’ stuff,” he says, though not his ‘greatest hits’ – those will be dusted off for an exhibition next year marking 20 years of Vettriano working as a full-time artist. “It will be very nice to curate it, I’ll get a chance to go over everything I’ve done and choose some for particular reasons,” he says.

With a portrait of horsey young royal Zara Phillips and a triptych of racing legend Jackie Stewart alongside the yachts and trams, is he growing sick of romance, and turning to sport instead? “I’m not so much sick of romance, I get incapable of it,” he says. “Because you get older, your libido drops away a bit, you’re hanging on like grim death to the past and memories, but I think so long as you’re single and unattached it will always have a draw, because there’s something terribly magical about meeting somebody.

“I’ve always been a sucker for romance, and always been extremely destructive when it comes my way. Once I started to really enjoy it, I’ve started to really destroy it. I’ve never quite understood why. I never quite seem to get it right,” he says.

“My problem is I suffer from melancholia. When you get me like this, today, I can be very amusing and good fun, but left to my own devices, instead of sitting thinking next year I’ll spend the whole summer in the south of France, I’ll sit and think about an argument I had with somebody years ago, or a love that went wrong, somebody who hurt my feelings. I’m either fuming or made really sad by it all. I never think about the future, I’m always stuck in the bloody past. Knee-deep in tears,” he adds, rattling off another husky dark chuckle.

“I didn’t set out to become an artist, I never knew that it was coming. All I was doing was copying people as a hobby to give to friends at Christmas, sell the odd one for £50. And I realised it was time to stopy copying people, to do originals, and that the subject matter had been in front of me all my life: women and sex. When I first exhibited and people liked them, I thought, ‘If you like that, you’ll love this!’, I went into overdrive.

“I never believed that anybody would be interested in anything that I had to say or paint,” he continues. “I never believed that because everywhere around me, I seemed to see abstract art, expressionist everywhere, art installations and stuff. I thought I just want to paint people, and I realised that people actually wanted me to paint people. Which has been rewarding, both financially and in a creative way that people have responded to.”

Unsurprisingly, the young British contemporary art scene leaves Vettriano cold. “I’ve heard of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and a few others, but I really don’t know. It astonishes me that when they have the Turner Prize I have never heard of anybody. I don’t much care for what they do. I think a light going on and off in a room, it’s pushing my boundaries to the absolute bloody limit. I like to look at something and think, ‘I couldn’t do that, that’s a real skill’.

“When I look at Lucien Freud’s stuff I think, ‘You are a master’. That’s what I like to see, skill and labour. I like to look at something and you can almost smell the sweat. I don’t feel that with modern art, you just can’t help but think about the emperor’s new clothes. You just feel somebody somewhere is having a laugh.”

His new work has been described as having “more light” than his intense, sometimes claustrophobic sexually-driven dramas. “You will be blinded by the light,” he chortles, breaking into a line from Manfred Mann’s Springsteen-penned hit. He insists that his work of recent years is less nostalgic than of old, Milan’s retro trams notwithstanding: “It used to be men in hats, but I can’t remember the last time I painted a man in a hat. It’s much more contemporary now.”

But the strong narrative sense of his work is something that will never change: “I know from speaking to people that like my work that it’s the story that grabs them, they like the idea of ‘What the hell is going to happen next?’

“An insider’s tip: it’s not going to end well!” he cackles.