Artist who breaks the mould

LIKE a good deed in a naughty world, the sculptor Alexander Stoddart made like a beacon for the town of Paisley on Monday night's Scottish Television Artery

programme. While others mumbled half-apologetically, half in jest, in defence of their hometown (doubtless cognisant that it had lost its status as fifth metrop of the nation some years back - and to East Kilbride at that), Sandy Stoddart was there to praise Paisley, not bury it.

A fat lot of thanks he gets for it, of course. Paisley is uneasy having

Stoddart in its midst. When the town installs a cornucopia of public art in its civic spaces later this year, you can be certain that Stoddart's neo-classical work will not be among it. When it comes to spending public money, Stoddart's style is infra dig. It is not contemporary, it is not conceptual, it is not avant garde.

Stoddart himself, never short of an opinion and a well-turned phrase with which to express it, would argue that his art is all of those things if only those with their paws on the public procurement purse would open their eyes and their minds. Instead, they are impressed by the shallow, the ill-made, and the temporal, he contends. His view chimes with that of many a man-in-the-street, who is unimpressed by Carl Andre's bricks at the Tate or Damien Hirst's pickled sheep at the Serpentine. Does that necessarily make him wrong?

I confess that I have long wondered whether Stoddart was entirely serious. Were his beautifully-crafted monuments more a slap in the face towards the Saatchi-led art establishment than considered work in themselves? Does the fact that you may not know his name, although many of you will have seen his work - the figure of David Hume at the top of the Mound on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, the Roman deities on Glasgow's Italian Centre, Blin' Harry at the Smith Gallery in Stirling, mitigate against or in favour of his importance?

But the sculptor of the Bieder Lally, an imperious bust of Glasgow's best- known civic leader, and the man who wants to create Scotland's Mount Rushmore by carving a figure of the poet Ossian into the Scottish landscape is quite serious. Sandy Stoddart is very serious indeed.

Look for the self-promoting,

attention-seeking wretch, he says, and you'll find it not at an old industrial unit on the eastern edge of Paisley that serves as his studio, but on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. There, a succession of contemporary works have competed boisterously for a permanent place in the heart of London, while the established residents around Nelson's column are ignored by passers-by. This is as it should be, he contends. The figures that form the silent majority are comfortable parts of the landscape, not determinedly

jarring notes.

''My heresy is that I don't exist in a chronologically controlled way. I keep diplomatic channels open with the past. I have been known to have relations with people that are not quick. In fact, some of my best friends are dead,'' he warms.

This runs counter to the culture of liberal mediocracy, says Stoddart, so he is vilified by the art establishment. Paradoxically, his common ground with the familiar monuments around us has given him outsider status. Hard times for himself, his wife, and his young family now largely behind him, he can be excused for revelling in it. ''Revolutionary art is always backward looking. The supposedly forward looking is always making its own establishment. Damien Hirst is avant garde only in the conventional sense.''

While the fascist iconography of the last war and the symbols of communism have been regularly used in a tokenistic way by those seeking to be confrontational in their art, Stoddart has found himself accused of being genuinely fascist. At Glasgow School of Art in the early 1980s, his interest in the classical and the figurative attracted the attention of the Anti-Nazi League. ''At the time I was making godforsaken sub-Rodinesque figures that would've got me put into a death camp,'' he reminisces, with a deliberately confrontational lack of taste.

In the same spirit, he will refer ironically to Adolf Hitler as

''the client'' and protest that the derogative ''fascist'' has become a synonym for ''scarily accomplished''. ''Modernism is inherently lazy and individualistic so it is happy to leave neo-classicism to Hitler. I feel an obligation not to leave well-made art in the grubby hands of Benito Mussolini.''

An increasing number of genuine clients are showing that, while they may not always go the whole road with Stoddart, they appreciate the skill and thoughtfulness he brings to a commission. This millennium, Stoddart is going to be very difficult to marginalise.

A fortnight ago, The Boots Company, chemists to a nation, unveiled its Millennium Sculpture Garden at its headquarters in Nottingham. A rather more successful exercise than the Greenwich debacle with which it has also been associated, the beautifully-

landscaped area includes nine substantial commissions. Many of them, although impressive in scale and craft, are little more than garden ornaments. Stoddart's work, a herm of Milton, is far and away the most intellectually rigorous of the works.

The first of his pieces in England, the bronze pillar with the bust of the poet on top, is every bit as mischievous as its classical antecedents. A quotation from Paradise Lost spills off the edges of the obelisk, which itself is only just attached to its base, appearing to fall backwards. The clients latched on to the link with the Methodist beliefs of founder Jesse Boot, but there is so much more to it than that, and it is about as ornamental as a war memorial.

Currently taking shape in that

Paisley studio is a substantial frieze, also to be cast in bronze, which will adorn architect Robert Adam's extension to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. A parade of winged boys, griffins, and standing females, it draws its inspiration from other parts of the building and is, Stoddart admits, a compromise on his original proposal which, incredibly, the Oxford committee found too laden with meaning. Challenged to ''make something meaningless'', Stoddart has, he says, ''resorted to satire'', which he now challenges others to read.

The big deal for

Paisley - and Princeton, New Jersey - has Stoddart working quite directly. This week the vice-president of Princeton University, Bob Durkee, was in Paisley to see Stoddart's completed figure of John Witherspoon, an eighteenth-century Paisley clergyman who became president of Princeton and one of the founding fathers of the United States itself.

''This is my heart's desire,'' says Stoddart of the monument. ''Clean of satire, heroic realism with rhetorical content. It is a noble idiom.''

Two copies of the statue will be cast, one for the Paisley University campus to be erected next year, the other for Princeton, due to land at Philadelphia (as Witherspoon himself did) early in 2002. Durkee, who explains that Witherspoon is a true hero to Princeton alumni, the first significant president of the college, and the only academic and clergyman to sign the Declaration if Independence, is fulsome in his praise of Stoddart.

''He is a sculptor who thinks about everything. Each piece of the work has a message. He has done everything he said he would and more.''

What Stoddart says he will do is make a trio of works for Paisley of its great men - the other two are architect Thomas Tait and Communist MP Willie Gallacher - and, of course, carve the likeness of Scotland's Homer in repose into a Highland hill. Those are his ''life projects''. I, for one, shall not be betting against his achieving them.