Perhaps twenty years ago now, while looking for modded content for The Sims*, a painting to place in game caught my eye. It was of a man and woman at a train station, the man in a somber grey suit and the woman in a bright red dress, their embrace ending a long separation. It was called “Back Where You Belong“, and led to my becoming a fan of Jack Vettriano, a miner who taught himself to paint. A print of that painting and another, “Lazy Hazy Days” now decorate my bedroom, and until very recently (when I hung a print of Grant Wood’s “Spring in Town”) he was the only artist to be featured there. Lovers and Other Strangers collects a hundred of Vettriano’s paintings into a single volume, prefacing them with a biography of the artist, and commentary on his work. There are a few other collections like this on Amazon, all with a theme: another is “A Man’s World” and focuses just on male subjects. This particular collection, as the name hints, is marked chiefly by the ‘torments of romance’, and so incorporates some of my favorite pieces like the aforementioned, plus “Dance Me to the End of Love”, “The Singing Butler”, etc. I’ve included a collage of some of my favorite pieces collected in this volume below, and as you can see Vettriano’s paintings all have a historic setting — though he’s not limited to a particular timeframe. In addition to his characters’ dress, which speaks to past eras like the 1940s, Vettriano’s backgrounds also add to the nostalgic feel, given the frequency of settings like train stations, booming factories, and cozy cafes that have been replaced in modern America by fields of asphalt, the rustbelt, and remarkably ugly fast food chains whose decor says one thing only: give us your money and get out. Romance, love, and even eroticism are a strong part of Vettriano’s work; while he doesn’t paint couples exclusively (many of his works have a sole male or female character, or depict casual socialization between groups of men, etc), they’re arguably his most memorable — sometimes for the beauty, sometimes for the pathos. There’s palpable emotion in a lot of his work, like sorrow, heartbreak, and wistfulness along with the joy and warmth of other paintings. One thing I noticed in studying the gallery in this book is how often there’s a voyeur-type figure in the paintings — spotted in a mirror, hovering in the background. Given the intimate moments we’re witnessing, like a man smoking a cigarette in bed, a letter dangling from his hand and despair on his face — I wonder if that figure is meant to be the viewer, in some way. I’m glad to have stumbled on a copy of this, as there were a few in here that I haven’t seen before despite actively following Vettriano and plotting to fill my entire living space with prints of his work for twenty years.

* Fun fact: things came round full circle, as I made a “Back Where You Belong” painting to include in houses for The Sims 4.

For frights and giggles, here was an early experiment of mine with Bing Image Creator, attempting to recreate “Back Where You Belong” with Frank Sinatra and Amy Winehouse.