'Wall decorator' Vettriano gives his art critics the brush-off

SCOTLAND'S most demonised artist has hit back at the critics who have accused him of being a plagiarist - and at "greedy" auction houses which inflate the prices of his paintings on the back of his notoriety.

In an interview with Scotland on Sunday, former miner Jack Vettriano defends his use of an artist's handbook to help him create The Singing Butler, his best-known and best-selling work.

He is also unapologetic about the prices his paintings have fetched and describes himself as a "trader" who simply puts his goods on the market.

"I just consider myself a trader," Vettriano said. "I take my goods to the marketplace and try to get the best price I can."

The greater glory of art doesn't come into it, he confirms. "That's not why I paint," he said. "It's wall decoration for me, I don't regard it as this big meaningful thing. My subjects are men and women getting off, that's all. Mind you, some people don't think sex is serious, but I happen to think it's terribly serious."

Any thoughts that he might now retire to enjoy his new-found wealth - he is estimated to earn around £500,000 a year from posters and prints of his works alone - are, however, well wide of the mark, Vettriano said. Although he has largely abandoned well-trodden themes from the past, such as beach backdrops to his most famous works, he intends to go on painting.

The 54-year-old Fife-born artist was speaking in the run-up to the opening of his latest exhibition at the Portland Gallery in London next month. The exhibition - Love, Devotion And Surrender - includes new pieces painted in the eye of the storm about him copying from an art manual.

Last autumn brought tabloid revelations that figures in The Singing Butler - which sold for £750,000 in 2004 - were copied from a £16.99 out-of-print artists' reference book.

"Of course I used the book. That's why it's there," said Vettriano. "As an artist you use whatever's to hand. If you've not got a model - and in my early days I couldn't afford them - you're like: 'How should that arm sit?'

"But if you were to look at the book, you would have to say that the guy who plucked these figures from different pages and put them together on a beach in a sunset and called the painting The Singing Butler was still being pretty creative."

Did the criticism hurt? "The way the story was told, inferring all I had to do was some colouring in, that was naughty, that was nasty. I find that difficult to forgive.

"It was a great story, no doubt about that. I just wish I hadn't been the one caught in the middle.

"The guy who went to the papers wrote to me the previous year saying he'd found a copy of the book.

"I thought: 'What do I do? Do I write back and say well done and have you thought about joining the police?'"

He admits to being surprised when the story appeared. "I got a shock when he went to the papers," he said. "Was that naive? Does it not prove that I didn't think he had a story, that I didn't think I'd done anything wrong?

"I still don't, and let me tell you, I would use that book again tomorrow if I had the need. That's what it's f***ing there for."

What he resents is being called some kind of cheat: "People say I've cheated or I'm a plagiarist, but that's just sour-grapes big-time. They cannot thole the fact that The Singing Butler sold for £750,000."

Gallery-owners whose relatives held the previous record could not bear the fact that he was outselling them, he claimed.

"I've usurped Samuel Peploe by a quarter of a million and Guy [Peploe of Edinburgh's Scottish Gallery; his grandson] I find astonishing. I once tried to show at the Scottish Gallery but he told me that would have caused a revolt. That's Edinburgh for you. Someone once said to me that the place revels in its mediocrity, and I've never had cause to dispute that."

Further fuel for his critics arrived earlier this month when his Dance Me To The End Of Love failed to raise its expected price at auction, selling for £290,000 - less than the lowest estimate of £300,000 and well below the £500,000 some experts forecast.

But Vettriano disputes that the relatively low price was proof that his bubble has burst. He claims the price was pitched too high and insists the price achieved is still good. "I can't be held responsible for the greed of auction houses," he added.

Although his beach scenes are the most popular with the public, he says they will no longer be a backdrop in future work. And he accepts there are probably too many Vettrianos on the market - and too many of a lesser quality - and so he will in future paint less.

He gives assurances, however, that the new show - which will transfer to Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery in July - will be far from his last, despite his newfound wealth.

"It's fanciful to suggest that I shouldn't bother with the hassle and just climb into my hammock," he said. "A man has to work, and this is all I can do."