Love On The Wing - A Summer's Magpie Tale

Jack Vettriano's Yesterday's Dreams, found on Tess Kincaid's The Mag 126

Love On The Wing

Through the summer air
I fly all scales quivering
in the golden light
with dust halos left
behind me sparkling, spelling
remnants of your name
as I remember
how you stood at the window
oh so easily.

July 15, 2012 9:00 AM

Among the most successful artists on the planet, Jack Vettriano has been dubbed with the Order of the British Empire. He is also nearly universally panned by art critics. As appears in Wiki:

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", Sandy Moffat, head of drawing and painting at Glasgow School of Art, said: "He can’t paint, he just colours in." Richard Calvocoressi, when 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 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 stilettoes." 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."

He lives the life some of us dream was our own. It appears Vettriano tried to join up with the main stream of the art world and was turned away. It was only then that he appealed so successfully to the wider public.

Wiki: 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, he earns £500,000 a year in print royalties. Each year a new set of limited edition prints are published, and his most popular work, The Singing Butler (which does not actually show a butler singing), sells more posters and postcards than any other artist in the UK. On 21 April 2004 the original canvas of The Singing Butler sold at auction for £744,500 — in 1992 when Vettriano painted the picture and submitted it for inclusion in the Royal Academy summer show, it was rejected.

Vettriano, born Jack Hoggan is a Scotsman raised in poverty, a man who remade himself along the way to his remarkable success.

A Magpie Tale researched and written this day for Tess Kincaid's The Mag. Click on this link to see how others have approached the prompt of Vettriano's Yesterday's Dreams.