His background as an engineer in his father’s excavation company inspired the elegance of the white collars depicted by the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano, born in Fife in 1951. The landscapes of the North Sea and the tens of metres of land before the shoreline are the painter’s favourite settings, as demonstrated by his most famous work, “The Singing Butler“, which sold at Sotheby’s for almost £750,000.
From his past as an engineer, he retains his taste for the aesthetic formality of men, who share the scene with beautiful women, with impeccable hairstyles and skirts often raised in hotel rooms by the hour.

They are married men, occasional lovers and mysterious bartenders or travellers to serious women, elegant and theatrical in the way they inhale the smoke of a cigarette or accept a dance, shrouded in shadow.
Vettriano’s subjects are constructed by patches of colour, a light mark dividing the backgrounds, like a Macchiaioli of noir, combining a sculptural conception of light and a chromatic structure of masters such as Hopper. The whites always have an important value in the composition, they are points of light that fuse the subjects into a single embrace, but also represent the status of the characters when they help to define the cuffs and reflections of diamond earrings. There is eros in the choice of many moments depicted by the photographer, but always photographed in the moment before exploding, when the bodies are for the last moment dressed, or just after a fire has already been put out.
It was a girl who gave Vettriano his first set of watercolours in the 1970s, since which time he has had exhibitions all over the world and collectors such as Jack Nicholson and Sir Alex Fergusson. In 2015 he also founded Jack Vettriano Publishing.