GHT
I'll Lock Up
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The so called elite of art critiques scoff at Vettriano. According to The Daily Telegraph he has been described as the Jeffrey Archer of the art world, a purveyor of "badly conceived soft porn," and a painter of "dim erotica." According to Vanity Fair, critics say Jack Vettriano paints brainless erotica. Sandy Moffat, head of drawing and painting at Glasgow School of Art, said: "He can’t paint, he just colours in." The Guardian's art critic Jonathan Jones, described Vettriano’s paintings as a group as "brainless" and said Vettriano "is not even an artist." Richard Calvocoressi, at the time director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: "I’d be more than happy to say that we think him an indifferent painter and that he is very low down our list of priorities (whether or not we can afford his work, which at the moment we obviously can’t). His popularity rests on cheap commercial reproductions of his paintings."
In 2013 in The Guardian newspaper, art critic Jonathan Jones wrote: "Vettriano fixes on fetishistic, stylish objects and paints them with a slick, empty panache" and "The world of Jack Vettriano is a crass male fantasy that might have come straight out of Money by Martin Amis."
In The Scotsman, George Kerevan wrote "He suffers all the same criticisms of the early French Impressionists: mere wallpaper, too simplistic in execution and subject, too obviously erotic." Alice Jones wrote in The Independent that Vettriano has been labelled a chauvinist whose "women are sexual objects, frequently half naked and vulnerable, always in stockings and stilettos." Regarding the criticism, sculptor David Mach has said: "If he was a fashion designer Jack would be right up there. It’s all just art world snobbery. Anyway, who cares, he probably makes more money than Damien Hirst anyway."
In October 2005, after the original of The Singing Butler sold for £740,000, it came to light that Vettriano had used the artists' reference manual The Illustrator's Figure Reference Manual to form his figures, using Irish actress Orla Brady as his model for the 'Lady in Red.'
Hurricane Jack!
Actually it's an "Impressionistic Santa with Rockin Red Fedora," by Karen Whitworth
