Vettriano The Clumsy Painter?

The figures in Jack Vettriano's famous painting The Singing Butler bear an uncannily close resemblance to photographs from a popular manual for illustrators. Anyone who has spent time looking at the painter's work up close, rather than in reproduction, will have easily identified that he is a technically poor and often manually clumsy painter whose real skills lie in composition and cleverly-calculated subject matter, rather than figurative painting. Copying from existing material is of course no crime and was once an essential part of any painter's training. What counts, though, is the product rather than the process, and in Vettriano's case the painted product has often been indifferent or badly executed. For the full story - click the title Irish Art