Vettriano is one of the UK's popular, controversial, and contemporary artists. This successful and famous Scottish artist is a self taught former mining engineer whose art has been exhibited in Edinburgh, London, South Africa and Hong Kong.

Vettriano emerged from the unlikely background of the Scottish coalfields - unknown and untutored - and has seen his canvases hung in the Royal Scottish Academy.

His first exhibition sold out, as did the second and he has since become Scotland's most successful contemporary artist. Vettriano's images are neo-realist - real in the sense that he portrays recognizable people in believable situations, yet heightened to that level of dramatic or romantic intensity which fuelled the fiction of the Hollywood dream factory or the novels of Raymond Chandler or F. Scott Fitzgerald. They are tales without text, storyboards about love and lust, possession and longing, pursuit and conquest.

He seems to understand perfectly the stylish sexiness and intrigue that occurs when high life and low life collide. His men are predators, gamblers - hard-edged but possibly soft-centred, Bogartian in period and attitude. His women are vulnerable, pliable, probably playthings if the price is right. And beyond the implied narrative of his paintings there is a curious remembrance of times past and lost, of squandered youth on blissful beaches.