Looking at the calendar on our wall things I like about his art include those mentioned in the BBC article you linked to previously. But I also like the hints of art deco style. The way the images could be from 40s poster adverts. The bright colours and contrasts, the simple lines. I think to an extent the blocks of different colours are what make people call it painting by numbers, but he drew the lines himself and picked his own colours and I like the result.
I don't say it's great art necessarily, but I do enjoy his work.
Yes - the professional critis seem to follow the point of view that for something to be good, only they can like it.
That's not what they should be paid for - what they're supposed to be there for, as far as I'm concerned, is to point out what works, what doesn't (so artists may produce better works), and to indicate what we lesser mortals may have missed (so we can enjoy existing works more).
On Friday I was wandering round the Pre-Raphaelite gallery at the Ashmolean, and thinking that something has gone horribly wrong since that period. The PR gang would have been horrified at the deliberate distaste for popularity that Modern Art now espouses.
(I think we need a new PR school to try to bring art back to what it should be - or rather, allow accessibility to not be an automatic black mark.)
And on Saturday, I was at a wedding over in Bath (at the assembly rooms, very Georgian tasteful) and thinking that almost everything played on the dance floor was at least twenty years old.
Vettriano isn't what I'd go for, but his work is a hell of a lot better in my opinion than the large majority of conceptual crap out there.
Vettriano's work is pleasant enough - hell, it certainly doesn't deserve to be lumped together with Tretchikoff or any of those cliched posters from Athena that hung on student bedsit walls all over the country - but to my eyes there's nothing challenging or multi-faceted about it that would make me want to look twice, or indeed to see anything new every time in it the way that one can with, well, much Pre-Raphaelite art. Whenever I'm in Manchester Art Gallery I always seem to notice diffent nuances in such works as Rossetti's "Astarte Syriaca" or Ford Madox Brown's(1) "Work". The thing is though, if the likes of Charles Saatchi or Nicholas Serota want conceptualism rather than, say, figurative painting, then conceptualism is precisely what's going to pop up on the Turner shortlists time and again, and if it's going to offend the Daily Mail readers all the better. You can't beat a bit of controversy in order to garner a few extra headlines.
Tez.
(1) - Yes, I know Ford Madox Brown wasn't actually in the PRB, but regardless of what the ghosts of Holman Hunt and Millais may think to the contrary, Brown's work is as Pre-Raphaelite as they come.
I think I'm with Richard Cork when he says (in that news.bbc.co.uk article) "That's actually one of the problems I have with Vettriano — speaking as an art critic — I feel that once I have glanced at it I've got it really, there's not much more to appreciate."
I wouldn't own any Vettriano. To own it, art has to be interesting enough that I'm willing to look at it daily for a month without becoming bored of it (in a calendar), or to take my undivided attention (in a book of prints). To be worth putting up on the walls more permanently, it has to be better still.
I think there are one or two Vettriano paintings that go a little deeper; Elegy for a Dead Admiral, for instance. The wind tearing at the formal diners' hair speaks volumes if you think about the way so many of his subjects are harking back to a dead age, in the teeth of endlessly advancing reality. Ture, he doesn't deliberately work layers of meaning and reference into his paintings, but there's also the point that while art may be that which conceals art, if it conceals it to the point where the greatest minds in history can't unearth it again then it's overdone. I don't enjoy things that I can't work out for myself given a few hints; those movies that are full of references to "classics of the genre" just annoy me, because they can't be appreciated properly without context not everyone should have. Art IMNSHO should work for both the aficionado and the amateur; that's the attitude I take to my writing, certainly.
Getting back to the subject, what I like about Vettriano personally is two things: the snapshot quality of the scenes that invites the imagination to run wild and fill in the context - which my mind happens to have a great love of doing - and secondly the way he paints light; his pictures really do feel like they have shape and form, almost as if you could step into them and touch the people, talk to the passers-by, and that's something I really like in an artist.
I think the scope for the viewer to self-insert into the work is probably what makes him so popular, actually; people like people, and they especially like people they understand, so if they can see themselves in something, they'll like it. Vettriano hints at a lot of background, at emotions and scenarios (flatteringly glamorous ones at that) but leaves the fine detail up to the viewer, who promptly comes up with their own backstory based largely on how they would feel or want to feel in the situation they imagine the painting expresses. I take advantage of this tendency in my fellow humans all the time - omit the detail, and 99% of the time people will just magically fill in the blank and assume you did what everyone else would do. Excellent for covering your tracks ;)
Well, Vettriano's work isn't actually bad, just a little… insipid.
Yes, it can be enjoyed. A bit. But there are a lot of other artists out there, such as Munch, Breughel, Constable, Delacroix, Dali, Magritte, Dadd, Bosch, Escher, da Vinci, Panini, Rembrandt, Arcimboldo, as well as more modern and/or obscure painters like Giger, Julian Murphy, Achilleos, Simon Patterson, Paul Kidby and Alan Lee. A lot of that stuff is universally accessible and appealing, despite there being a lot more to it than to Vettriano's work.
Given the competition, I'm not sure he's worthy of much attention.
Giger and Bosch are accessible? They may be "better" artists in the please-the-critics sense of the word, but they are very definitely *not* things I'd want hanging in my living room. Geesh - being greeted every morning by Necronom I (http://www.giger.com/Posters/PosterInfo01.jsp) or one of those women with penile pieces of technology shoved into various orifices is not my idea of fun. I had one of his landscape paintings up for a while in my room as a finalist, and I had to take it down because it gave me the creeps in the evenings..
Well, firstly, I didn't claim all that stuff is universally accessible, just a lot of it. Secondly, things don't have to be "nice" to be universally accessible.
While normal people might not put Giger on their wall, an awful lot of people have that album by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Still more have seen Alien. Doesn't that count as accessibility?
Again, Vettriano's work isn't bad. It's nice to look at, and it's beautiful.
However, millennia of human endeavour have produced a lot of art. This means I have the choice: I can look at art that's merely beautiful, or I can look at art that's even more beautiful and detailed, absorbing, thought-provoking, etc. Why settle for Vettriano?
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-19 02:02 pm (UTC)I don't say it's great art necessarily, but I do enjoy his work.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-19 02:41 pm (UTC)Then again, the name didn't immediately ring a bell to me.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-19 02:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-19 03:24 pm (UTC)That's not what they should be paid for - what they're supposed to be there for, as far as I'm concerned, is to point out what works, what doesn't (so artists may produce better works), and to indicate what we lesser mortals may have missed (so we can enjoy existing works more).
On Friday I was wandering round the Pre-Raphaelite gallery at the Ashmolean, and thinking that something has gone horribly wrong since that period. The PR gang would have been horrified at the deliberate distaste for popularity that Modern Art now espouses.
(I think we need a new PR school to try to bring art back to what it should be - or rather, allow accessibility to not be an automatic black mark.)
And on Saturday, I was at a wedding over in Bath (at the assembly rooms, very Georgian tasteful) and thinking that almost everything played on the dance floor was at least twenty years old.
Vettriano isn't what I'd go for, but his work is a hell of a lot better in my opinion than the large majority of conceptual crap out there.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-20 03:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-20 07:30 pm (UTC)The thing is though, if the likes of Charles Saatchi or Nicholas Serota want conceptualism rather than, say, figurative painting, then conceptualism is precisely what's going to pop up on the Turner shortlists time and again, and if it's going to offend the Daily Mail readers all the better. You can't beat a bit of controversy in order to garner a few extra headlines.
Tez.
(1) - Yes, I know Ford Madox Brown wasn't actually in the PRB, but regardless of what the ghosts of Holman Hunt and Millais may think to the contrary, Brown's work is as Pre-Raphaelite as they come.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-19 04:31 pm (UTC)I wouldn't own any Vettriano. To own it, art has to be interesting enough that I'm willing to look at it daily for a month without becoming bored of it (in a calendar), or to take my undivided attention (in a book of prints). To be worth putting up on the walls more permanently, it has to be better still.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-19 05:11 pm (UTC)Getting back to the subject, what I like about Vettriano personally is two things: the snapshot quality of the scenes that invites the imagination to run wild and fill in the context - which my mind happens to have a great love of doing - and secondly the way he paints light; his pictures really do feel like they have shape and form, almost as if you could step into them and touch the people, talk to the passers-by, and that's something I really like in an artist.
I think the scope for the viewer to self-insert into the work is probably what makes him so popular, actually; people like people, and they especially like people they understand, so if they can see themselves in something, they'll like it. Vettriano hints at a lot of background, at emotions and scenarios (flatteringly glamorous ones at that) but leaves the fine detail up to the viewer, who promptly comes up with their own backstory based largely on how they would feel or want to feel in the situation they imagine the painting expresses. I take advantage of this tendency in my fellow humans all the time - omit the detail, and 99% of the time people will just magically fill in the blank and assume you did what everyone else would do. Excellent for covering your tracks ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-19 05:48 pm (UTC)Yes, it can be enjoyed. A bit. But there are a lot of other artists out there, such as Munch, Breughel, Constable, Delacroix, Dali, Magritte, Dadd, Bosch, Escher, da Vinci, Panini, Rembrandt, Arcimboldo, as well as more modern and/or obscure painters like Giger, Julian Murphy, Achilleos, Simon Patterson, Paul Kidby and Alan Lee. A lot of that stuff is universally accessible and appealing, despite there being a lot more to it than to Vettriano's work.
Given the competition, I'm not sure he's worthy of much attention.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-20 01:46 am (UTC)Giger and Bosch are accessible? They may be "better" artists in the please-the-critics sense of the word, but they are very definitely *not* things I'd want hanging in my living room. Geesh - being greeted every morning by Necronom I (http://www.giger.com/Posters/PosterInfo01.jsp) or one of those women with penile pieces of technology shoved into various orifices is not my idea of fun. I had one of his landscape paintings up for a while in my room as a finalist, and I had to take it down because it gave me the creeps in the evenings..
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-20 02:45 am (UTC)While normal people might not put Giger on their wall, an awful lot of people have that album by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Still more have seen Alien. Doesn't that count as accessibility?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-20 02:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-20 03:59 am (UTC)I wish I had more of his stuff. I'd love to put a couple on the wall and watch people try and get their heads around it. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-20 04:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-20 04:52 am (UTC)However, millennia of human endeavour have produced a lot of art. This means I have the choice: I can look at art that's merely beautiful, or I can look at art that's even more beautiful and detailed, absorbing, thought-provoking, etc. Why settle for Vettriano?