Dirty Girl Things

Monday, January 22, 2007

Number Thirty-One

Sexual Edginess with a Touch of Film Noir & Glamour

Jack Vettriano has had successful exhibitions in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, and New York. Although he is usually frowned upon and derided by art critics, he is one of the most commercially successful living artists. 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, a London newspaper, he earns £500,000 a year in print royalties.

The traditional milieux of the romantic paintings, where ballroom dancing is accompanied by dinner jackets, bring to mind, “the good old days, when the world seemed more stable”. It is a nostalgia matched by the style of the paintings, whose stark lighting and neo-realist edges also echo 1940s films and the jackets of popular novels of that era. There is a sense of melodrama, an edge of the surreal. Movement is captured, frozen: the turn of a dancing couple, or a man who is having an affair peeping through a window.

Vettriano cuts out incidental detail and focuses our eye on the interaction between the figures - which, in the case of the sexual works, is always tense. These tensions in turn provide dramatic ambiguities, but they are controlled with a tight range so that the narrative is clear, ensuring an immediate impact rather than a challenge. A painting might provoke the question “Is that woman with her husband or someone else?”, but not “What is going on?”, much less “What am I looking at?”

Beautiful Losers and Game On