Pict and mixed: Clare Henry meets the Scotpack who are making it big in America

IN New York Scottish artists are everywhere. The Calvinist work ethic coupled with Gaelic charm and a certain toughness of accent seems to help too. ''Without Lesley Raeside my life would be a mess,'' says Keith Sonnier whose major and magnificent sculpture retrospective has just opened at Marlborough's glitzy uptown gallery. ''Her Scottish voice gets things done and that's what I need of an assistant.''

Sonnier's show is a wonderful mix of colourful, hi-tech neon

and muted, low-tech bamboo and thread. Versatile to a degree,

he veers between formal and

elegance and quirky constructions, also making prints, ceramics, rugs and paper pieces, and in the 1970s experimenting with video and TV, even orchestrating a satellite link between his east and west-coast studios using Nasa. But he says: ''I walked away from that because I'd have turned into a TV producer.''

He went travelling to India, Japan, Bali and returned to less artificial materials. The death of his father in rural Louisiana resulted in him using found objects (old jugs, bottles and rubber tubing his father had kept) plus neon. ''You can't do the same thing all the time - but over a 30-year career you develop a personal language: a layering of imagery.''

Keeping a balance between studio sculpture and commission and with Raeside as helper in his beautiful Tribeca studio, Sonnier has also recently completed major public projects: long neon walls at Munich airport and for Washington's International Trade building.

Raeside herself is exhibiting widely with a new show in Mexico of large minimalist muted monochrome paintings on muslin combined with sewn lines. It's part

of her artistic vocabulary learned

at Glasgow School of Art and implemented later as a founder member of Glasgow's Transmissions Gallery. ''It was such a struggle when we first opened in Chisholm Street; so cold, so difficult a space with its cobbles. To me it's incredible Transmission has survived!'' She came to America 14 years ago on a Skowhegan scholarship and stayed ''on a wing and a prayer''.

She explains: ''I've always had a studio, but before I started working for Keith part-time it was hard.''

One artist to benefit from Raeside's Transmission pioneering is superstar Douglas Gordon, also in New York preparing for a prestigious DIA Centre show, Double Vision, opening February 10, concurrent with an exhibition in Lisbon. Another young Scot who has successfully vaulted the Atlantic is Ian Scott from Wick and Dundee, now Brooklyn-based, whose enigmatic and detailed fantasy portraits drew a great response from the Silverstein Gallery in New York's new buzz area of Chelsea. His show next year will include a series of paintings on Golum of Central Park. Actor Timothy Speed Levich has agreed to pose - a change from Scott's last sitter, poet George McKay Brown. Meanwhile his latest oils can be seen at London's Islington Art Fair with Glasgow's Compass gallery and at Edinburgh's Open Eye Gallery, as part of their celebration of Salvesen Award winners of which Scott was one in 1992, using

his #8000 to visit - guess what - New York!

Another Salvesen, Magda, widow of the famous American abstract expressionist painter Jon Schueler who worked among the greats like Rothko, Pollok and Jasper Johns, is currently preparing for his two major march retrospectives; a touring show titled Ways and Weathering plus the publication of his book, Sound of Sleat. Schueler first came to Mallaig from New York in the 1950s, later meeting Salvesen there in 1970. They lived in Mallaig till 1975 where he painted his most wonderful atmospheric cloudscapes and skies. They returned to New York in 1976 but always spent long periods paintings in Scotland for its landscape was crucial to his work. The Sound of Sleat between Skye, Rum, and Eigg was a favourite inspiration. Still on 38, Scott Kilgour has been in New York since 1983. Graduating from Glasgow with Steven Campbell et al, he settled permanently in the Big Apple and recently exhibited in

New York, San Francisco, and Miami. His next show, at Glasgow School of Art in October, may be a surprise, for this erstwhile figurative painter has moved into abstraction and also steel and lacquered wood sculpture.

Tom Eccles, of similar generation to Raeside, Kilgour and Scott, is perhaps Scotland's most high-profile young success. Only four years after arriving, he's now director of the famous New York Public Art Fund. Projects include Rodin at the Rockefeller Centre, Keith Haring in Park Avenue, Tony Smith in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, Rachel Whiteread's transluscent water tower in SoHo, an upcoming Jeff Koons multi-site sculpture even in collaboration with Koons's retrospective at the Guggenheim, and a new baby daughter called Rachel.

As with Kilgour, not all successful Scots are new to New York. Patricia Leighton moved here 13 years ago and has established a powerful presence with big public art commissions ranging from a lake punctuated by Seven Runes (15ft standing stones each weighing 11 tons) and commissioned for the headquarters of the Department of the Environment, Fort Lauderdale, Florida to private bridges in Princeton.

Leighton is best known in Scotland for her 1000ft-long Sawtooth Ramps earth sculpture on the M8 near Bathgate, but will soon gain fame as the creator, (together with sculptor Del Geist currently showing in Berlin) of The Wyndings.

This 700ft-long, 300ft-wide

and 48ft-high zigzag of grassy earth adjoining the new Stirling approach road is based on an extended Pictish key pattern, and is not only aesthetically pleasing, but will save money by utilising spare earth thrown up by the road construction - which would cost more to move!

Meanwhile she's exhibiting prints in Baltimore, is a finalist for a big commission in Atlanta, and planning a sculpture walkway on New York's disused high-line railway track.

Another senior artist is tapestry legend, Archie Brennan, who celebrated 50 years in the business last summer. He reached New York via the scenic route: (Australia where he established Melbourne's Tapestry Workshop in 1984; New Guinea where he designed the Parliament Building interior; New Zealand and Hawaii), having ''stepped out'' of a hectic 1970s life as director of Edinburgh's Dovecot Studios, chair of the British Crafts Centre and Edinburgh College lecturer.

He moved to Manhattan in 1993 to be with Susan Maffei, also a well-known weaver. Nowadays he does exactly what he wants to do: weaves, draws, travels, teaches. No commissions. ''We are very happy with our lives.''

Last week he won another award - this one from Illinois. They are both exhibiting at Manhattan's Gail Martin Gallery; Maffei's work naive, colourful and narrative; Brennan's more subversive and subtle. ''I'm really intrigued by understatement. And I love gentle earth colours and natural materials like raw silk and jute. Tapestry has a strong narrative tradition. My series Dersu Uzala: The Journey, is an Everyman thing. Full of omens and dreams. It was me; an allegory.''

Brennan has always drawn, attending life classes still. ''I love it.'' Two years ago he began to look at weaving from figure drawings; a draughtsman in weft. ''I love the mark making that tapestry has.''

Another theme is windows - his latest, American Gotham, a ''flip'' on America's famous painting of a farmer and his wife by Grant Wood. ''I speculated that they sold up; became middle-class. I put him in a suit holding a teacup instead of a pitchfork; her peroxide blonde. The Bank of America glimpsed through the window is the new temple.''

His students (now ECA lecturers) plus their students, in total 24, are currently exhibiting at the New Jersey Centre for Visual Arts.

Not all Scots making New York's art world jump are painters or sculptors. Art historians Juliet Kinchin and Paul Stirton are here for a year from Glasgow Art School and Glasgow University respectively to research and write several books and catalogues on interior design around Mackintosh's time.

Kinchin has already completed her part of a catalogue on E W Godwin for a show at the prestigious Bard Graduate Centre for Studies in the Decorative Arts; while she and Stirton are co-

writing on Sickert; on Geddes and on Brave New World, a show coming to Glasgow School of Art as part of the 1999 Year of Architecture celebrations. This show compares modernist architecture in Scotland and Hungary. ''It's so exciting to get a fresh perspective on things,'' says Kinchin.

New York certainly provides that in abundance. Here at least the Scotpack is giving the Britpack a run for its money.