Publishing Artwork

 

Jack Vettriano (b 1951). Bluebird at Bonneville. 

Oil on canvas, 24 by 40 inches. 1996.

 DMB Publishing has an interest in the publishing of all artwork. I have always had a strong emotional attachment to specific pieces of art. It has evolved from my father and grandfather both being water colour artists with many of their paintings still in my possession. The aspect of art that has always fascinated me is how you can become so emotionally attached to a piece of artwork which then generates a strong desire for you to want ownership. Once owned it can still carry on giving pleasure over many years if not a lifetime. You then realise what often motivates the artist to create a painting and find a buyer for it. They want the owner to be someone who would feel bad if they didn’t have it. The owner forming this very strong emotional attachment so in fact inheriting some of the emotions of the artist that he or she put into the painting. In fact the artist letting go of their artwork to someone who will have the same level of appreciation and love of it.

The painting above by Jack Vettriano had this effect on me. I first saw it in an exhibition on a canal boat in Stratford upon Avon. It instantly attached itself to my consciousness. Love at first sight. It was obviously a copy using the Giclee printing technique basically sophisticated ink jet printing onto a canvas. At £200 at the time it was not to be an instant purchase. But for some reason this picture became an obsession. I purchased cards of the print but always wanted to get back to the experience that the Giclee print had given me. Some years later I brought a Giclee copy and hung it on my wall. That was probably 10 years ago and this picture has never stopped being a source of pleasure to me.

Oddly enough painting of cars was outside of Jack Vettriano’s normal genre where he had been, unfortunately, put down by the art establishment as being a painter of “dim erotica”. The car paintings were the result of a commission from Sir Terence Conrad in 1996 to create a series of paintings for his new Bluebird Gastrodome in London. The seven paintings, inspired by the life of Sir Malcolm Campbell, hung there for ten years. The Bluebird paintings were auctioned by Sotheby’s at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire on the 30^th August 2007 and made more than £1m in all. The most expensive was the Bluebird at Bonneville at £468,000.

But from a publishing perspective Jack Vettriano could earn up to £500,000 per year in print royalties. Where his painting, The Singing Butler, has been one of the bestselling images in Britain. On the 21^st April 2004 the original canvas of The Singing Butler sold at auction for £744,500.

In February 2009 Vettriano launched Heartbreak Publishing and with his own London gallery, also called Heartbreak, which exclusively represents him. This is the very effective commercial implementation of an artist’s work through Heartbreak Fine Art Ltd with other artists now represented. In 2010 Heartbreak Publishing produced a boxed set featuring signed, limited edition prints of all seven of the Bluebird paintings to mark the 75^th Anniversary of Sir Malcolm Campbell’s final World Land Speed Record. This was on the 3^rd September 1935 with Bluebird powered by a V12 Rolls Royce R supercharged aero engine exceeding 300 mph.

 

Look at these websites for more background.

Jack Vettriano on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vettriano

Jack Vettriano’s own website www.jackvettriano.com

Heartbreak Publishing website www.heartbreakpublishing.com