Fallen Angels

Jack Vettriano's images are neo-realist—real in the sense that he portrays recognizeable people in believeable situations, yet heightened to that level of dramatic or romantic intensity which fuelled the fiction of the Hollywood dream factory. Alongside 44 Vettriano paintings are stories, poems, dialogue from plays, and other fine examples of Scottish writing. W. Gordon Smith has woven an anthology of new and old writing around the painter's images, extending the lives of his characters beyond their frozen moments on canvas.