Jack Vettriano: The Art World's Barry White

Jack Vettriano is trapped in the toilet when I arrive. This gives me a moment to take in the penthouse suite of the luxury hotel where I’m to spend the next hour with Scotland’s most successful living artist. Decked out in stylish, modern furniture and with a balcony overlooking central Edinburgh, it’s more a wealthy bachelor’s living room than somewhere to spend a vacation.

He’s soon liberated from the bog, asking me not to write about the toilet escapade, but in an interview that ends with a lengthy treatise on procreation and, more specifically, the role played by women’s lingerie in human reproduction, the bathroom incident seems trivial.

We’re here to discuss his retrospective at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. Featuring over 100 paintings, the show includes his best-known painting, The Singing Butler, which sold for £774,000 in 2004, and is the most comprehensive exhibition of his work to date.

He’s surprisingly compliant for a man of his age and significance and happily sits where I ask him. His stiff posture and stilted small talk suggest he’ll be less compliant in conversation, but nothing could be further from the truth. At times during the interview I get the sense his honesty is almost pathological, and so unmediated are his answers that he strikes me as naïve.

He is, nonetheless, charming and friendly and approaches every question with the seriousness you would expect from someone who once told The Telegraph he can get up in the morning and say to himself, “I fancy making £50,000 today.”

But it wasn’t always like that, and Vettriano will be the first to tell you so. Born Jack Hoggan into a working-class family, Vettriano was brought up in the seaside town of Methil in Fife, where he left school at 15 to start working in the coalmines. In a strange inversion of logic common among social-climbing baby boomers, he now regards going down the pits as “the best thing I ever did, because it’s all turned out incredibly well.”

At 21 a girlfriend bought him a set of watercolours and he started to “potter around.” “My friends were all down the pub playing darts, drinking pints and getting rat-arsed, and I was at home painting,” he says. “But I wasn’t trying to teach myself how to paint. I was trying to paint so I could say to people, look, look what I’ve managed to do. There was no set agenda, that in 20 years’ time I was going to be a professional artist. It wasn’t until I was 36, 37 that I could see that I had a certain talent.”

Vettriano packed in his job, separated from his wife and moved to Edinburgh, where he set out to become a painter. He started dressing differently – “aye, no like a transvestite” – so he would stand out from the crowd and look more like an artist. 

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“One day I just thought to myself, why don’t you paint women erotically dressed, the way that you would like them, the way that your wife used to dress for you” – Jack Vettriano

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Around this time he applied to study painting at Edinburgh College of Art, where his portfolio was rejected. But the rejection had little effect on his progress as an artist and in fact, like his childhood experiences down the mines, he has come to regard the rebuff as “another huge break, because if they had accepted me I wouldn’t be here today.”

Like anyone who has cast himself in their very own myth, Vettriano plays fast and loose with the facts of cause and effect. It seems a little too accommodating to suggest his youthful experiences of coalmining and his rejection from art school – aspects of his life that must have seemed pretty unfair and discouraging at the time – led to his success as an artist.

He’s certainly not the only person to have been seduced by his mythology and, without a doubt, this personal narrative has had some impact on his success.

“The press loved the whole story,” he says. “Had I gone to art school there wouldn’t have been a story. The fact is, I went down the pits when I was 15. That’s what made the story.”

He began his painting career copying his favourite paintings, some of which hang in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, including works by the Scottish Colourists and the Glasgow Boys. But he was soon frustrated with all the copying and for a brief while struggled to develop a style of his own.

“What frustrates the amateur artist is that you think that everything’s been done, what else is there for you to do – there’s nothing you can do. And then one day I just thought to myself, why don’t you paint women? Why don’t you paint women erotically dressed, the way that you would like them, the way that your wife used to dress for you.”

And here we arrive at Vettriano’s firmest conviction: the role of sexuality in his art. He is unequivocal about the importance of eroticism in his work, but when pressed about the representation of women in his paintings, which, according to Alice Jones in The Independent has led to him being labelled a chauvinist, he shows no remorse.

“That’s the one thing I have no issue with. You can criticise the way I actually apply paint to canvas, but my subject matter, I have no problem with that at all. I think we’re living in a curious world of hypocrites who on the one hand will rubbish my work and who will then go home and watch some porn. People, especially in this country, are not particularly honest about their sexuality. There’s too much being hidden underground.

“I think my work, if it suffers, it suffers because there are some people in power who think that sex is not real art. They think that maybe intercity decline, industrial decline and drug problems – that’s art, that’s addressing real issues. Whereas, if you’ve got a couple sitting on a sofa with a glass of champagne, you know, and she’s got her suspenders and everything on, then that’s not art. That’s somehow not art. And I will argue till the day I die that that is art. Because that is exactly why we are here, to reproduce. And what she’s doing is putting on her finery in order to attract him. He’s got on his finery in order to attract her – so they can mate and the species can continue. Now I know you can knock a few holes in that argument, but that’s why we’re here.”

I was not expecting Jack Vettriano to appeal to evolutionary theory to justify his depiction of women wearing stockings, and at first it seems disingenuous. Does he really believe his admirers see him as an advocate for furthering the human race?

I start to wonder, in parody of Vettriano’s cod-Darwinism, if these are his genes talking. Is this a childless man taking credit for some of the procreation going on in the world? Is he vicariously furthering the human race like some kind of art world Barry White?

“And on that note,” Vettriano’s publicist interjects, “I’m afraid you’ve run out of time.” We finish the interview and he shakes my hand. “Tell me,” he asks in hushed earnestness, “do you like my work?”