Saturday 5th June 2004

Peoples Choice

SUSAN MANSFIELD

LAST SEPTEMBER, ALEXANDER Millar found himself at one of the biggest art fairs in the country, staring at a stand with his name on it. "I was just standing there with my mouth open when one of the bosses [of Washington Green, his publisher] came by. He patted me on the shoulder and said: ‘It’s showbiz, son.’"

And Millar, 43, is on his way to becoming a star. If there was a Top 40 for painting, he’d be the highest new entry. The limited edition prints unveiled in September were sold out in little more than a month, an unprecedented rate for a newly discovered artist. His Christmas edition was gone within two days. His originals are selling faster than he can paint them and steadily rising in value.
The parallels with painter Jack Vettriano are striking: both grew up in Scottish mining villages; both are self-taught painters who held a range of jobs - Millar is a former window cleaner - both paint an idealised vision of the past, though Vettriano’s sultry film-noirish scenes could scarcely be more different from Millar’s cheerful, Chaplinesque "gadgies". The sale of Vettriano’s The Singing Butler at Sotheby’s in April for a record price of £744,800 demonstrated the power of building popularity through print sales, whether or not an artist attains critical acclaim.

Millar appears to be going the same way. There are stories of queues outside galleries, shows that sell out in less than ten minutes, fans driving hundreds of miles to secure an original. A painting bought less than two years ago is now worth eight times its original price. He is already one of Washington Green’s bestsellers and his prints are selling well in the US where a generation of art collectors are learning the word "gadgie". "Folk are selling my autograph on eBay," he says, incredulous. "What’s all that about?"

Every now and again during our conversation, Millar pauses as if he’s still trying to believe what he’s telling me. "I thought you had to be dead before you got this kind of success. I read these things about Alexander Millar, but it doesn’t feel like me. I still feel like a window cleaner who’s getting away with it. I still reckon everything in window-cleaning: How much is that painting? It’s six months’ window-cleaning."

He talks a lot about luck, about accidents. "A lot of it is being in the right place at the right time with the right product. I was on the cover of a catalogue, it said ‘Alexander Millar - modern phenomenon’." He grins. "I’ve always wanted to be one of them."

As yet he is unchanged by success. His studio is his kitchen. The lounge is full of paintings in various stages of completion. He’s mid-way through a nationwide tour, visiting a list of galleries every weekend in his car, driving back to Northumberland in between to make more work to see. And yet he’s trying fame on for size, like the long velvet jacket he has donned for the photographer. By the end of the interview he has his feet on the coffee table with the air of one who might get used to all this. His voice is a mixture of Scots self-deprecation and newly found confidence.

Millar has painted for 20 years, professionally for 12, though most of that time he was barely scraping together a living. "I’d be looking down the back of the sofa for 20p to buy a loaf of bread," he says. Only in the last three years, when he started painting the drunks and down-and-outs he remembered from his Scottish childhood, or "gadgies" from the streets of Tyneside, did he notice that something strange was beginning to happen.

"About three years ago, I did a show in Glasgow. I should have had 40 originals but I had 15 because people were coming to the house and putting down ridiculous sums of money. The preview was on the Sunday, I got there on the Friday to hang it and there was a queue of people outside. People were grabbing the paintings off me, ripping the packaging off. A woman bought three and then phoned up a friend who bought one there and then - £4,000 for a painting he’s never even seen."

What mystifies him most is that his career took off at a time when his personal life was in crisis. "My dad died - he had been ill for a long time with Parkinson’s Disease - and I had some sort of breakdown. My life just unravelled at the seams. My marriage broke up, it was hell, I actually wanted to die. But my career was going through the roof."

He wonders if the breakdown prompted him to focus his art on the figures from his "secure, carefree" childhood in the village of Springside near Kilmarnock. "It was a bit like Brigadoon, it used to come out of the mist every 20 years. I was raised in the 1960s but it felt more like the 1940s. I grew up surrounded by guys like this."

His background, he says, was "rough as a badger’s bum". He left school at 16 and served his time as a joiner, but did "every job under the sun" before ending up cleaning windows in Newcastle. However, he "always doodled". "I used to annoy my mum and dad because I spent all my time in my teenage years looking for something. I suppose I was looking for this."

He taught himself to paint, beginning with landscapes in watercolour. "Then I put figures in the landscapes and gradually they grew. It was as if they were getting ready to leap out of the canvas, looking for me to find a way of how to do this, running towards me shouting ‘Let me out!’. The figure became the predominant thing and the background got fainter and fainter, until one day I had a lot of white paint left on my palette. Typical Scot, I thought: I’m not going to let that go to waste, so I mixed it around till it was creamy and did this misty background. All of a sudden the figure seemed to leap out shouting ‘I’m free! You’ve found it at last!’"
 

This heralded the beginning of what is now his signature subject matter, little men in flap caps and tackety boots, sometimes with a whippet or a bicycle. They’re part of a tough world and almost invariable drunk, but they are happy, sashaying drunkenly around a bottle, swinging on a lamppost, freewheeling down a hill. They always have their back to the viewer and Millar believes this is one reason for their success: people see in the images their own father or grandfather. Some people look at his paintings and cry, others burst out laughing. Everyone responds.

There is little he likes better than "people-watching", being a spectator in the carefully choreographed "street ballet". "I remember once being at Irvine Cross, watching a drunk guy with a fish supper. He was swaying back and forth trying to get a chip into his mouth. He was an exhibition in himself."

These days Millar works with a model, a man named John Derby. "He’s got a face like a rottweiler chewing a wasp. He has what he calls his Robert Mitchum face - it looks like a bag of hammers. It’s great because he’s going into all these posh galleries and going ‘That’s me.’ When I’ve got a pile of ideas I phone him up. We sip some wine - the bottle in the scenes is always empty - then he gets into all the gear and poses." Millar takes digital photographs, which he uses to make sketches (these now sell for up to £800 a time). Then he transfers the image to canvas, adding layers of paint gradually to separate tones.

He says he’s doing what he loves and feels under no pressure to produce a continuing supply of gadgies to feed public demand. "These old guys have got legs, they are going to run and run for a long, long time. The more I go into these characters the more they come alive to me, the more I can play around with them." He says the fun element is growing. One of the works in progress in the lounge is a "gadgie" version of the Beatles’ iconic Abbey Road: "Shabby Road".

HOWEVER, HE IS KEEN TO emphasise that his "overnight success" took 20 years and that it has been a long, hard road. A hint of anger creeps into his voice when he talks about the galleries that spurned him because he is self-taught. "It used to frustrate the living daylights out of me. I’d go into a gallery and owners would say: ‘Which college did you go to?’ Then they would say, ‘No, thank you, because you’ve had no formal training.’ It really gets up my nose. Now these self-same galleries are phoning up asking me to exhibit with them. Why? Because I can make them a hell of a lot of royalties. They’ve got to be joking."

He says he has "lots" of celebrity clients but "they don’t like me talking about them". Sting is known to have bought his work and This Morning agony aunt Denise Robertson was an early buyer and a great encouragement. ("She told me the work would win out in the end.")

So far the critical art establishment has paid him no heed. "It doesn’t overly concern me. They’re not paying my wages. The people that buy my paintings pay my wages. The greatest compliment anybody can ever give your art is parting with their hard-earned cash. If I can make a wee old dear cry because my paintings remind her of happy memories, or if somebody comes in, bursts out laughing and goes ‘I know that guy,’ nobody can take that away from me. I’m not worried about acceptance into the art society. If I’m accepted, fair enough, if not, bollocks. Jack Vettriano had the same thing, he’s entirely self-taught and the establishment hate him for it. Now he’s laughing all the way to the bank."

If Millar has a role model, it’s Vettriano. "I’m following in his footsteps. He blazed the trail. I admire him for having done what he’s done and I’m totally flattered by being compared to him. Vettriano just exploded on to the scene. Everyone in the art world is wondering, ‘Who’s the next guy?’ I’m going, ‘Oh dear, it’s me.’ Really? How did that come about? I haven’t the foggiest."