The first day of the Jack Vettriano exhibition was on Saturday and it seemed to be pretty busy, although a lot of the people there were because of the book signing (cancelled, unfortunately) by the big man so we’ll have to wait and see if it turns into a big money spinner for the RWA. I genuinely hope so as it seems to be an attempt by the gallery to engage with a wider public. Vettriano isn’t a darling of the critics and I can’t call myself a huge fan but I admire the fact that he’s a successful self taught artist and his sense of design and use of light is good. It’s one of the reasons why his work reproduces well and Mr and Mrs Public obviously respond to the anecdotal quality of his pictures. Get up close though, and they start to look a bit”stodgy” It’d be nice to see him play around with the surface qualities of his pictures for example and use a wash or glaze or two. His drawing also has a lot of the hallmarks of somebody who only ever works from photos. There’s nothing wrong with using photos as source material, artists have been doing it for years but it can be a problem where the photo doesn’t give you enough information. At this point it really helps to have some experience drawing people from other sources such as life. Many of the paintings in this particular exhibition are based on photos of ballroom dancing competitions by Jeanette Jones which you can see on the wall opposite. They’re nice photos but lacking in clear details for a painter, the figures of the male competitors are just dark cut outs really with a hand or two just about visible and little to go on for the arms themselves. In the corresponding Vettriano paintings they just end up looking crude and ventriloquist dummy like and the hands look disappointingly like sausages. A wiser artist might have taken a clearer photo of a person wearing a jacket with his arm in the same position to use as an additional reference rather than just plough on. That’s my opinion, for what it’s worth. I think it’s important to say why you don’t like something rather than just splutter something like “Jack Vettriano is the Osama bin Laden of Art” which is what a lot of Fine Art types would probably tend to do. So that’s my attempt.
Having said that I did learn one suprising thing reading the current issue of the RWA’s free magazine which contains an interview with the artist, Jack is a Simon Bates fan!
“I always work with the radio on. I’m a man who’s lost in a time warp of the ’70s and 80′s. I listen to a station called Smooth–Simon Bates. He does a small piece called Your Story;a real-life love story, with the music they’ve asked for, Very emotional. It brings it all back to me–who I was seeing, why did that go wrong? And believe it or not, very often by the time the song’s over I know what it is I want to paint. A lot of my work is autobiographical, often about the mistakes I’ve made, and the pleasures I’ve had”
If you are under the age of 40 you are probably better off skipping the rest of this article as it just won’t mean a lot to you. but trust me, for alternative types in the 70s and 80s he was truly the Sultan of Smarm! Simon Bates ( who, with the benefit of hindsight is probably quite a nice chap etc) was an uber popular Radio 1 D.J. who would feature an item in his morning show called “Our Tune” where a listener would send a long letter about the ups and downs of their relationship read in Bates’ booming William Shatner-esque delivery. (Lot’s of pauses. In. The Middle of a. Sentence. That kind of thing) This would go on for an incredible length of time, the background music was “The Love Theme from Romeo and |Juliet” by Henry Saloman and His Orchestra and finish with a request to play “Our Tune”. A sample “Our Tune” might describe the relationship between “Kevin” and “Lisa” and how they shyly started dating after bonding over their shared love of bell-ringing/Airfix model kits/C.B. radio/handwriting analysis/jet engines by the office photocopier after which they would move into together but Lisa would then discover that Kevin had a secret love of Barbara Streisand Songs,embarrassing body odour or more usually some form of substance abuse. Their love would endure many ups and downs from that point on. Lisa might move in with “That Dave from Accounts” at which point Kevin would hold up a Securicor lorry with a sub machinegun made out of pieces of balsa wood or may’be a spud gun and be imprisoned for 10 years. They would always be back together again by the end, however and the writer would finish by asking them to play their song, usually something by Billy Joel or Our Kid.
It was a very easily parodied format, and one that Batesy has continued to use over the years in his various radio shows. Go on, do a quick search on YouTube if you don’t believe me. Is this the key to the artist, I wonder.? How could you Jack?!!!!? All I can say is, I will never look at Vettriano’s paintings in. The same way. Ever. Again.
Jack Vettriano exhibits at the R.W.A. 28th June-31st August
THE DARK HEART OF JACK VETTRIANO
05 Tuesday Jul 2011
Posted in Artists Work
Advertisement
Will, I find your remark interesting that sometimes a photo resource will not provide enough information for a larger painting. Obviously, life provides a better resource, but do you feel a sketch from life suffers the same limitations as a resource when it comes to doing a larger painting? That is how I now try to work and I’d be interested in your thoughts. Do you feel, e.g. that a life drawing is a better resource than a photo of the same subject – sure I could (and might) make an argument out for it.
As for Vettriano, there are so many issues with his work that would not be so, but for his massive popularity. Curiously, for me it is not really about obvious drafting and modelling shortcomings – and I know I can’t talk – it’s the emptiness in his work that I think I resent. I just don’t believe in it… so i guess it’s more the “lost heart of Vettriano” for me… and on that bombshell. Cheers. Ian.
Hi Ian. Thanks for your comment. I’d just assemble whatever references you can and press on regardless. The main problem I think you’d find working from a photo aside from the point I’ve just made above is the temptation to put everything in that you can see can be overwhelming where working from a drawing that you’ve made or life can act as a kind of filter. I had an interesting experience recently walking around the National Portrait Gallery in London. Everything downstairs had a kind of high resolution look, crammed with detail in both the background and foreground which I put down to the ubiquity of photography whereas upstairs in the Victorian section everything seemed just that little bit softer, more human somehow which I can only assume is down to the artists working more from life and drawings. Of course the nice thing about a photo is that everything is there. You might miss something in a drawing and not be able to go back for another look, but then a good drawing is going to be better than a crappy photograph. It’s hard to generalise really. I think you just need to use whatever you can.
I don’t think that working from photos per se has to be a problem however. What I’ve found when teaching beginners that are first of all working from photographs and then from life is that there isn’t usually much difference in the quality of the persons work. In other words, if they can draw pretty well from a photo they will probably be able to work well from life too. Whether you have a problem working from photos will depend on during what era you went to art college, or if you went to art college at all. When I was at college my best friend got a first doing paintings based on squared up photographs a practise which was actively encouraged by the tutors who were all abstract painters; as far as they were concerned as long as the painting had nice surface qualities they weren’t too bothered. I always felt a bit queasy about this sort of thing and never went down that avenue. However, You don’t have to spend too much time doing research to find examples of pictures of artists based on engravings, for example or copied from Medieval pattern books (compendiums of references that were jealously guarded by the artists workshops ) Many of the portraits produced by Reynolds were merely heads that were subsequently added to/finished by a drapery artist who dealt with all the clothing and background details. (According to one source that I’ve read he produced 120 portraits a year,1 every three days) Van Dyck used to use separate models for his sitters hands (i.e. they were not the hands of the person in the portrait) Art has never really been about just copying from life, I think it must have only been about the time of the 19th century when painters were trying to assert their moral superiority over daguerreotypes that you would have started to hear statements along these lines, for obvious reasons really, although even then you have artists such as the celebrated Orientalist painter Gerome taking photographers along with him on painting expeditions to the Middle East.
If you are going to paint figures though I think it is important is to have a practical knowledge of anatomy which can only come from drawing bodies and body parts from lots of different angles so that when you work from a photo or drawing you can breathe life into it with that knowledge. In a previous post I mentioned how Thomas Eakins used to send his painting students to sculpture classes so that through learning how to model parts of the body in three dimensions they would be better able to depict them using just paint. This was something he was taught while studying under Gerome in the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
Of course you’re probably right about Jack being all surface. The Simon Bates thing kind of sums it all up for me really!
I’m starting too hear the music, so I’d better go!
Thanks Will, I agree that a drawing does help filter out what is not essential and I appreciate the balance in your examples – some thought provoking ideas for the purist. Another well-known example would be Vermeer with a camera obscura. Anyway, food for thought. Thanks, Ian.