Jack Vettiano never made bones about what it was that inspired him as an artist.
“I want to paint attractive women, I don't care about the men,” he once told me. 'I will spend half an hour on turning on a seam on a stocking and two minutes on a man's face.
'I want to paint the things that touch me, that move me because they are me. I know my priorities. '
Vettiano, whose death was announced yesterday at the age of 73, was first fascinated by the female form as a teenager. The many contacts that followed would inform his life's work.
These include relationships with some of his models and muses, as well as a recognition that he had visited brothels and downmarket bars in the past to 'investigate' his art.
The details of those assignments resonated through his paintings – the large beehive hair, the red lipstick, the cigarettes, the stockings and suspenders and feeling of sexual tension.
Ironically, it is an image of a very different nature for which Vettiano will be reminded forever, one that changed this Scottish miner into the most popular artist of Great Britain.
The singing butler is called, it shows an elegant couple of dancing on a storm-wake beach accompanied by their girl and umbrella-waving butler.
Jack Vettiano in his London studio in 2010
Vettiano on a Clarence House reception organized by Queen Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall
Vettiano in Bonhams Auction House in Edinburgh with his painting an unexpected guest
It was painted in 1992 in the very early days of his professional career, only to be rejected by the Scottish Arts Council and by the Royal Academy for his summer exhibition.
Little more than ten years later it was auctioned by Sotheby's in Edinburgh. After bright bidding, it was eventually sold for a stunning £ 744,800, the highest price ever paid at an auction for a Scottish painting.
The sale and use of the image on everything, from biscuit to birthday cards, would ignore the debate around the value of Vettiano as an artist. On the one hand, large parts of the art company, contemptuous for his craft and the 'Sleazy' were the subject of many of his paintings.
As Richard Calvocoressi, the former head of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, once wrote: “We think Vettiano is an indifferent painter and he is very low in our priorities.”
On the other hand, the collectors, including Jack Nicholson and Sir Alex Ferguson, and the general public who loves the work of Vettriano that his prints of Van Gogh, Dali and Monet exceed.
More fuel was added to the fire when a newspaper announced that it had discovered an art manual from which Vettiano had 'copied' a number of figures in his most famous work.
It was then in 2005 that I met the painter for the first time. Determined to defend his reputation against the criticism of the art world, he invited me to his Art Deco apartment in southern France to interview him for the Daily Mail.
There he defended the work and said: 'What I do is not cutting, it does not push any boundaries back. It pleases me and luckily it also pleases other people. I do not apologize for the singing butler, far from. I think I was able to do that, to have made an iconic image from a £ 17 manual, deserves a little bit more than contempt. '
Vettiano's The Singing Butler became a bestseller statue in Great -Britain
Vettiano's The Billy Boys, one of his most famous paintings
Vettiano's exhibition A retrospective in Glasgow
But it was clear from that meeting and from interviews that I had kept with him for a subsequent book how much the controversy and criticism had put him.
Because although his popularity brought him financial success – at its peak he earned royalties of £ 500,000 a year – I felt that it never made up for the lack of critical appliance.
Of course he took care of melancholy, he also fought against cocaine and alcohol abuse for many years. “If a critic writes that I am someone who just 'colors' and that I should not be an artist, well, then you should be under human in order not to be influenced by that,” he admitted.
'I know that I have to be the most popular artist of Great Britain, but that is with the public. I am the most unpopular artist of Great Britain among the critics. And maybe you can never get it in all sides. '
Vettriano was born in 1951 and the second of four children was born in Bill and Catherine Hoggan in a coal board house in a mid-terrace in Methilhill on the east coast of Scotland.
Life was a shortage of the Being Being – “Another cup of water in the soup,” was his father's cry when he heard that his wife was pregnant again – and there was never any expectation that Jack would do anything else than find a profession. In ten years his family moved to nearby life, a popular holiday destination that would form his view of women.
“In those days, women all wore stockings and you could be guaranteed if you went out, you would get a glimpse of a stocking top,” he said. “That did for me … I spent the age of ten to about 13 years on my knees, desperate to catch a glimpse. Then there were the working girls who used to be around the Inner life hotel.
Me and a friend would wait and look at them, all dressed in that very cheap way. I believe that the things you move when you go into puberty will never leave you completely. '
Vettiano left the school at the age of 15 and an internship as a mining engineer and a number of short-term jobs followed.
Then, at the age of 22, he went out with a teacher who encouraged him to study at the university and also gave him a number of posterven.
During the next two decades, Vettriano will practice to copy other artists, starting with the impressionists who will continue to Picasso and Dali.
During that time he moved in white borders among a number of jobs and married Gail Cormack, a local girl from Kirkcaldy.
But when the years were over, Vettiano became disillusioned with his middle class lifestyle and started to devote all his spare time to painting his own work.
He took over a variation from his mother's maiden name and in 1988 submitted two small paintings at the summer exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. One was from a man who leaned moody against a pillar in a ballroom, the other of a woman in a white slip. Both sold within a few minutes.
“I remember that I went back home that night and thought:” If you like that kind of work, I have much more where that came from, “he said.
Vettiano started painting 16 hours a day, stopped socializing and his marriage collapsed. In 1990 he moved to Edinburgh. It was a particularly hedonistic era, with regular visits to sauna salons and prostitutes.
Solo exhibitions followed, just like representation by a leading London Gallery. Vettiano started spending more and more time in the English capital and to buy an apartment close to Harrods. He later also bought a home in Nice.
His success was largely fed by his decision in 1995 to allow his works to be reproduced. He thought that the move could yield a few thousand pounds a year, but the prints, posters, cards and coffee mugs were extremely popular and saw him be called 'The People's Painter'.
Then came the sale of the singing butler and the controversy that surrounded it. As he told me at the time, he was only what artists had always done, 'foraging' for material to work from.
Such a source was the figure reference manual for the illustrator, purchased at a bookstore in Edinburgh. He turned for inspiration when he came up with the idea for the singing butler.
“I wish I could say that there is a terribly romantic story behind the painting, but that's not,” he said. “The moment I had an exhibition in Perthshire and this old lady who had seen a painting that I had done from this guy who digs ace on a beach, said:” You know, son, you are very good at doing beaches. '' '
Recognition would, if not from the art world, follow in the form of an OBE for services to visual art.
Vettiano later struggled with poor health, but he continued to paint. At the age of 70 he revealed that he had not one but two new female muses, Eastern Europeans aged 38 and 42.
According to his publicist, Vettiano's body was found in his apartment in Nice on Saturday. It is said that there are no suspicious circumstances.
The Scottish prime minister John Swinney was a tribute to him and said: 'I am very sorry to hear that one of the best known artists in Scotland, Jack Vettiano, has died and I want to express my deepest participation to his family.
“Jack has made a unique and suggestive contribution to artistic life in Scotland.”
How history looks at its work, only time will learn. But as Vettiano noticed himself, if you can't please everyone, pleasely please many people is not a bad start.
