Jack Vettriano

Jack Vettriano OBE born Jack Hoggan (born 17 November 1951), is a Scottish painter. Jack Vettriano grew up in the industrial seaside town of Methil, Fife. He left school at 16 and later became an apprentice mining engineer. Vettriano only took up painting as a hobby in the 1970s, when a schoolteacher friend bought him a set of watercolours for his 21st birthday.His earliest paintings, under the name "Jack Hoggan", were copies or pastiches of impressionist paintings his first painting was a copy of Monet's Poppy Fields. Much of his influence came from studying paintings at the Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery in neighbouring Kirkcaldy. In 1984, Vettriano first submitted his work to the shell-sponsored art exhibition in the museum. Vettriano's breakthrough year was 1988, when he felt ready to display his paintings in public and submitted two canvases for the Royal Scottish Academy annual show. Both paintings sold on the first day and Vettriano was approached by several galleries who wanted to sell his other work. The success and attention contributed to the breakdown of his first marriage and he moved to Edinburgh, changing his name to Vettriano, adding an "a" to his mother's maiden name. Further successful exhibitions followed in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, and New York. His paintings are reminiscent of the film noir genre, often with romantic or nude themes. His original paintings now regularly fetch six figure prices, but he is thought to make more money from the sale of reproductions. According to The Guardian, he earns £500,000 a year in print royalties. Each year a new set of limited edition prints are published, and his most popular work, The Singing Butler, sells more posters and postcards than any other artist in the UK. On 21 April 2004 the original canvas of The Singing Butler sold at auction for £744,500 — in stark contrast to 1992 when Vettriano painted the picture and submitted it for inclusion in the Royal Academy summer show, only to be rejected. In November 1999, Vettrianos 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. A series of paintings by Vettriano were sold for a total of more than £1m on 30 August 2007. The most expensive being Bluebird at Bonneville, bought for £468,000 at a Sotheby's auction held at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire. The painting had been part of a series commissioned by restaurateur Sir Terence Conran for the Bluebird Club. Vettriano has studios in Scotland and London. He was represented by the Portland Gallery, London from 1993 to 2007 and counts Jack Nicholson, Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Tim Rice and Robbie Coltrane amongst his collectors. To date, five books have been published about Jack Vettriano, the most recent of which is entitled 'Studio Life' and was published in March 2008. In 2008 Vettriano painted a portrait of Zara Phillips MBE (horse rider and granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II) as part of a charity fund-raising project for Sport Relief 2008. The painting is entitled 'Olympia' and it is to be auctioned later this year at a charity fund-raising auction along with works by Sir Peter Blake, Rankin, Gerald Scarfe and Stella Vine. All proceeds from the charity auction will go to will go to Sport Relief, an initiative of Comic Relief, a charity registered in England no. 326568. The portraits project was featured in a BBC programme Sport Portraits shown on March 10, 2008. In February 2009, Vettriano launched his own publishing company, Heartbreak Publishing, to publish and promote work by other artists and to distribute his own published works directly to his fans and collectors. [from Wikipedia] Music by:Thomas Newman