THE man who put the “gadgie” into art has a big exhibition coming up and there’s talk of a new statue for a city street. DAVID WHETSTONE talks to Alexander Millar about his life of dramatic highs and lows.

TWENTY two years ago he was “a Tyneside window cleaner with a passion for painting”, according to one newspaper article of the time. Alexander Millar has come a long way since then.

Firmly established at the commercial end of the art spectrum, his prints and original paintings hang in the homes of celebrities and ordinary people around the world.

Sting, Cheryl Cole and Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant own examples of his work but it strikes a chord with many people who see, in Alexander’s jovial working class figures, echoes of their roots in the industrial north.

A big exhibition of Alexander’s work – his biggest yet, he says – is due to open on March 26 in the capacious exhibition hall of the Great North Museum: Hancock.

The brainchild of his publisher, Washington Green Fine Art Publishing, it puts an artist who has never had any formal training on a pretty impressive pedestal.

Events are planned around the exhibition launch in aid of the Bubble Foundation which helps babies – and their families – suffering from a rare inherited condition called severe combined immune deficiency syndrome (Scid).

Crucial to Alexander’s success is his central, most recognisable character, his “gadgie”. Invariably viewed from behind to give him an Everyman quality, he sports the uniform of the working man of a few decades ago – battered jacket, baggy trousers, sturdy boots, flat cap.

This archetypal miner/labourer/ shipyard worker represents for very many people the father or grandfather or great grandfather of fond memory.

Many men like these used to trudge home from the pit, yard or factory along queasily-lit back lanes to a homely door in a terrace of brick.

In Alexander’s paintings, they are frequently given a jaunty twist, wobbling along on a bike, taking an unsteady swipe at a chasing dog or, more fancifully, cavorting with a red balloon.

The intellectual side of the contemporary art world may recoil but Alexander isn’t going to worry about that. Currently in negotiations to buy an expensive house in Newcastle, he is enjoying the fruits of a success beyond his wildest imagining.

When journalists first beat a path to his door he was living in a council house in Holystone, North Tyneside. He was still cleaning windows but was starting to exhibit some modest landscapes and harbouring artistic ambitions.

He had come to Tyneside from Scotland as a young man to be with the girl he would marry. They had two sons who are now heavily into music, which was also one of Alexander’s early ambitions although he laughs when he says he just wasn’t good enough.

But he’d always liked painting and once saved up £28 to hire a car and go to Manchester where he encountered the work of LS Lowry, another artist who did well out of caricaturing the industrial north.

Looking back, he sees clearly the moments when fortune beckoned. There was, for instance, his problem with backgrounds.