The exhibition is being held at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow and the first thing to say is that there are an awful lot of paintings crammed into the space provided – this made the exhibition seem claustrophobic. This wasn’t helped by the similarity of subject matter on display – painting after painting on the same idea and using the same very restricted pallet. As y the exhibition the paintings are all on a theme and come from his earliest work – pride of place goes to probably his most famous work ‘The Singing Butler’.

After this the paintings come thick and fast and all have a sort of ‘Singing Detective’ or film noire theme (of course the paintings were in colour but the feel of them reminded me of this). This is when we start to hit one of the problems I have with Vettriano’s work. In this series of paintings he has a very limited pallet, mainly reds and browns, and he does not appear to be able to create any sense of depth between the main characters and their background. To me this just gets very wearing and by the end of the series I found myself just walking past not really caring to look at what was displayed. In this style are a series of suggestive paintings which, in my view, aren’t that erotic.

We then get a series of paintings based on a summery, Mediterranean theme and this at least lightens the effect of the exhibition. However, as there are so many of the same style the effect is that you are looking at a contact sheet of photographs from which you select your favourite for the advertising campaign.

At one end of one of the rooms are a couple of paintings that Vettriano made for a club in London which was once a garage for Donald Campbell cars. They look as though they were direct copies of photographs of the day although to be fair they were well executed and as they were for a specific purpose worked quite well.

So far this seems all too negative and I guess I have been influenced by some of the comments I’ve read about Vettriano’s work. “Painting by numbers….” “…the Jeffrey Archer of the art world…” “…brainless…not even an artist…” and “…he doesn’t paint …he colours in…” I suspect that much of this is petty professional jealousy given the amounts of money he allegedly earns. Most of his work is of a type and it doesn’t vary that much however, there were one or two paintings that I thought were actually quite interesting,these usually were simple portraits with uncluttered backgrounds which I felt showed some real talent.

As to whether he is a great artists I don’t think that is fair to even ask as this is the job of posterity to judge. What he is a competent painter who produces work of a type again and again. You are unlikely to be moved by his work but you will get exactly what you expect and it will no doubt cost a significant amount of money. I have seen too many so called modern artists to agree with much of the criticism of his work – he is what he is. I think the final word on this for me is that should I ever win the lottery it is unlikely that I would spend any of this money of a Vettriano. This being said a lot of people had a lot of very positive things to say of about the paintings in the visitors book.

The exhibition is well worth visiting as you do get a really good feel for Vettriano’s work and you can’t then make up your own mind. There is one final thing to note

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