Jesmond artist Alexandar Millar talks about his career

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His paintings are instantly recognisable for their warmth, friendliness and cosy nostalgia, but they were the product of the most harrowing time of Alexander Millar’s life.

As he watched his father slowly die he would draw characters they had known years earlier to help revive memories of happier times.
‘I was trying to make light of it,’ he said. ‘I started doing sketches of men from the village, all old miners with flat caps and seeing who he remembered to alleviate the situation I was in, watching my dad die.

‘As a child I was always a people watcher. I remember my gran’s shoes and her bunions, I remember the guys coming down the street and the almost balletic movement of lifting one leg over the bike and gliding down the street. I kind of took those fine details and they came out when my dad took ill.

‘He was ill with Parkinson’s disease for about 25 years. It was awful. In the end he had cancer as well and it was just horrendous to watch him go. When he died in 2002 my life unravelled. I just cracked and went mad. I had a huge mental and physical breakdown. I was living in a car for weeks and my marriage broke up.’

His paintings of old men in flat caps – his gadgies – are now highly sought-after and sell for thousands of pounds. The paintings show honest working men and for a time Alexander could have grown into one himself; he was employed on a building site and as a window cleaner around Morpeth before turning to art full-time.

‘My uncle Peter got me the job on the building site in Glasgow,’ said Alexander, who was born in a Scottish mining town and now lives in Jesmond. ‘I was 16, I left school on a Friday and started at the building site on the Monday. I wanted to be an actor but my dad said no chance. I was there with guys who ate raw meat and trailed their knuckles on the ground but I always knew there was something different out there for me but I didn’t know what.

‘When we’re young we think we can do anything but then we go though school and teachers tell you you’re not good enough, and my dad was like that – I hated my dad for that, so perhaps it’s a strange thing that his death affected me as much as it did.

‘Being told you’re not good enough is a good thing and a bad thing – it drives you on and makes you produce your best but you always get the same message.

‘My dad was brought up in an austere way and in the village we were born in you had to conform. I have friends that still live up there and they will never leave – the village can become the whole world and you can become scared of the outside world. From an early age I wanted to go and see the world, not just conform. I was on the building site for three years and I hated every day of it.’

He began cleaning windows and when the weather was too bad to complete his rounds, he would paint, copying the style of Yorkshire landscape artist Ashley Jackson. He sold a few, but when he started painting the gadgies he remembered from his childhood, his career really took off. At one early show he sold out within half an hour of unloading the car two days before the preview night – it would have taken longer to sell out but his collection had already dwindled from 40 to just 14 as people bought paintings at the door of his Northumberland cottage.

‘People ask if I will ever stop painting the gadgies, but it’s my family, my childhood and where I grew up – it’s what makes me. It also earns me a fortune!’

But it might never have happened were it not for his father’s long illness. ‘I speak to lots of children and the only advice I can give is to believe in yourself,’ he added.
‘If you have an ounce of self belief you are already a step ahead but people go through life not believing and become sheep. Life can swallow you up if you’re not careful. I was married for 20 years and had three children – I did the normal thing but when my dad died my life was turned upside down.

‘Becoming mad was a big help to me. If you get the chance, I recommend it. I lost about four stones of weight, I had that haunted look, I was talking really fast and I contemplated suicide. But that experience shaped me.’

He spent a few months living in a friend’s attic before moving, first to Shropshire and then to Newcastle’s Quayside before his latest move to Jesmond.

‘The house I’m in now is a big place,’ he said. ‘I’m rattling around on my own. I’m dying to have a game of hide and seek.’

As his stock rose, he collected famous fans, like many people collect his paintings. Our conversation is littered with references (not in a name-droppy way, just as matters of fact) to Kiefer Sutherland, Tony Blair, Robert Plant and time spent with A-list stars in LA.

He paints at his studio in Ouseburn and enjoys having visitors – ‘I’m not one of these who likes to hide away in silence. ‘I work best with company’ – and the old dream of appearing on the tv has not gone away entirely. He is in talks over developing a programme idea in the country and America.

‘It’s a kind of TV art programme with a difference,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to give too much away but it’s a kind of cross between Who Do You Think Are and the Dog Whisperer, an art programme that would delve into peoples’ pasts.’

Few subjects would be likely to produce as interesting a programme as Alexander himself.