Millar’s tale

THE tired old guy wandering home after a long day at work; the drunk struggling to eat a bag of chips; and the small dog cocking its leg against the street corner – these are just some of the iconic images captured by contemporary artist Alexander Millar.

Millar has gained international acclaim for his hugely popular “gadgie” which is featured in a major new exhibition at the Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle.

The exhibition celebrates the life of the “working man”, inspired by steelworkers, miners and shipworkers of Newcastle and the North-East.

“It’s the guy who built the bridges and laid the rods,” says Millar. “So often we celebrate the great men like Armstrong and Earl Grey, and the ordinary working man is overlooked.”

His paintings conjure the nostalgia of a bygone era when the North-East’s industrial identity was at its peak. Millar had a tough upbringing and it is memories of his childhood that have inspired much of his work.

He grew up in the small mining community of Springside, near Kilmarnock on the west coast of Scotland. “People have photographs, I’ve got my paintings,” he says. “The old men dressed in dark suits and flat caps smoking Woodbines, old ladies gossiping on the street corner wearing big overcoats, pinnies and tartan headscarves – all interested me and I used those as a template for what I see today as being the gadgie.”

Millar has a flair for making the ordinary extraordinary, even something as simple as a drunk with a bag of chips. “I once watched an old guy who was drunk eating a bag of chips,”

he recalls. “He was trying to get the chip into his mouth and couldn’t because he was staggering all over the road. It was like watching Rudolf Nureyev doing Swan Lake, it was like a theatrical production.”

As well as the humorous characteristics, his work often portrays a much darker side. His father had Parkinson’s disease when he was in his 40s. Millar never got on with him and being an only child, suffered the brunt of his frustration.

“He used to beat me up and tell me I was never any good,” he says. “My father had a lot of troubles and took them out on me. I used to do little sketches of old men in the village when he was dying and we kind of laughed at them. The sketches eventually turned into paintings, but my father died before I had success.

He would never have praised me and it left me wanting to prove myself. Even now that he is dead and gone, I feel I’m still trying to prove something to him in a strange way.”

Millar went through a nervous breakdown following the death of his father ten years ago and it was the scale of the loss, he believes, that pushed him to pursue his passion for art.

“If you’re going to produce work of any note it has to come from deep inside, once you paint from the heart, that’s when you start to see something different,” he says. “It was my father passing away that was my big creative kick up the arse.”

His mother died two years after his father, but also struggled to understand his devotion to art. “I remember having a conversation with her once,” he recalls. “I had two houses, three cars and my paintings were selling for £1,000 and she said, ‘do you not want to get a proper job? Do you not want to be a window cleaner or something?’.”

Millar left school at 16 and moved to the North-East, where he drifted from job to job including – to his mother’s relief – a stint as a window cleaner. He was 20 when he started to paint and recalls going down to the Armstrong Bridge, in Newcastle, and watching the artists at work. Instinct told him he was just as good, if not better. He became a professional artist in 1988. Despite not having any professional training, he has had sell-out exhibitions and raced 10,000 other artists to the final of the Daily Mail’s Not the Turner Prize competition.

His next big break came in 2003 when he was signed up by leading art publisher Washington Green Fine Art, in Birmingham. The Evening Standard has likened him to Lowry and he has produced more than a dozen major collections, which have sold out nationwide, with originals regularly fetching five-figure sums. Even Hollywood came calling in 2009 when Millar was the only artist invited to represent the contemporary British art scene in LA for Britweek.

To coincide with the exhibition in Newcastle, which features about 70 original paintings, there are also six limited edition signed prints on display at Castle Galleries stores in York, Leeds and Harrogate until May. There are even plans to unveil a full-size statue designed by Millar later in the year.

“I hear people saying, ‘he’s an overnight success’ and I keep saying, it’s a long bloody night, I can tell you that much,” he laughs. “I’ve been through the mill to get here and people don’t often see that.”

His biggest challenge, he says, is still trying to overcome his father’s low opinion of him and to find the courage to continue what he is doing.

“I’m driven to be the best I can and to prove my father wrong,” he says. “I’m never satisfied with what I do, but that’s probably the best place to be. I’ve never taken drugs and don’t intend to, but that’s the kind of feeling I get when I look at a finished piece. The minute that feeling goes, I get an itch to better it and to do another.”

Having been in the North-East for 30 years, Millar considers himself an “adopted Geordie”. As much as he loves the quayside in Newcastle (where he lives with his wife and three children), he finds himself drawn time and time again to the back lanes and old shipyards for inspiration.

“I’m drawn to places that aren’t touristy,” he says. “Places that have got ghosts and no longer exist, that’s what I try to capture in my paintings.” He pauses, before adding: “I have come to love this area. It’s the people I love, I feel privileged to live here.”

• Alexander Millar: Working Man is at the Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle until May 8. For further information, visit working- man.co.uk or castlegalleries.com