Jack Vettriano: How his final exhibition rekindled his love for Fife
Jack Vettriano spoke warmly of reconnecting with his roots as a major retrospective of his work draws to a close at the gallery where it all started.
The Fife-born painter, who died at the weekend aged 73, said the 2022 exhibition at Kirkcaldy Galleries rekindled his affection for the Kingdom, prompting fond memories of his formative years.
For the former mining engineer, the show – which was delayed from 2020 because of the pandemic -was a welcome return to the gallery where he developed his passion for art, having been gifted a set of paints for his 21st birthday. It included previously unseen works which he painted as Jack Hoggan, and was the first to focus on his formative years and early career before he achieved international success.
Vettriano said of the venue: “It means everything to me – perhaps in retrospect because I haven’t lived here for so long – but it’s fitting that this long look back over my career has taken place where it all started.”
The artist was still living at home in Leven when he first took up painting with oils – a process that required copious amounts of turpentine to clean brushes and make the paint more malleable.
It drew a less than enthusiastic response from his father, who would often knock on the artist’s bedroom door, protesting about the overpowering smell.
“I came home one night,” the artist fondly remembers, “and he’d put a note on the door saying ‘do not enter without wearing your barrier gown’.”
Included in the show were several personal effects, including a paint palette, family photographs from childhood days and a model of the Bluebird car that features in one of Vettriano’s best-loved paintings.
They sat next to two doodles scribbled on betting slips, which were gifted by the artist to his grandfather.
The sketches, completed when the artist was seven or eight, were two of many he drew on unused slips that Pasquale Vettriano provided to encourage young Jack’s love of art.
Jack had a close bond with Pasquale, who left Italy as a boy when his parents emigrated from Lazio in 1904. Known to all as ‘Big Pete’, he was a regular visitor to a bookie’s shop in Leven.
Drawings of a boat –next to a starfish and a whale – and of a man beside an ambulance are signed ‘To pop from Jack’.
The drawings were displayed next to a black and white photograph of the pair, dressed for a special occasion, and taken in Leven in 1959 or 1960.
“For a boy that liked to doodle and get ideas down on paper, those betting slips were ideal.
“Pop loved the horses and, when we visited his home, he would have an ear cupped towards the television set, watching the racing intently.
“He knew if he gave me the slips, I would start to draw – so he would stuff his pockets full of them at the bookie’s and bring a wad back to the house.”
Said Vettriano: “Pop was a quiet man and a gentle soul, who knew that I loved to create pictures, and I know he would have been proud to have seen the exhibition.