Jack Vettriano was born in Scotland in 1954. With no formal art school training, he started to paint in his spare time at the age of twenty-one and his work was first exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy's annual exhibition of 1989 where both paintings were sold. The following summer he had equal success at The Royal Academy in London. Vettriano's paintings have the ability to make you feel nostalgic for a time and mood that although never experienced have become familiar though cinema. He creates a world of edgy romance where the men are tougher and the women more unavailable. Each picture seems to be an episode in an ongoing drama, played out in a glamorous Hollywood of the part, although the vibrancy of colour is one never seen in the films of the towns heyday. With a style compared to Hopper and Sickert, Vettriano has moved to the forefront of contemporary artists, his popularity due, not only to his technical skills, but to the rarer gifts of realism and humour. In the last nine years interest in, and desire for Jack Vettriano’s work, has grown rapidly. There have been sell-out solo exhibitions in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and New York. Aside from his exhibitions, Vettriano has acquired a vast following through the posters and prints of his paintings, which are distributed worldwide. This year the two best selling art posters in Britain are both Vettriano images and, to date, more than 500,000 posters of Vettriano’s paintings have sold worldwide. Paintings by Jack Vettriano can be found in private, corporate and public collections worldwide.