Alexander Stoddart, recently appointed the Queen’s Sculptor in Ordinary in Scotland, will receive his honour at a ceremony at Paisley town hall today. He is the first person to be granted the Freedom of Renfrewshire, whose privileges include being able to graze sheep in the town centre, for more than half a century.
Speaking exclusively to the Sunday Herald ahead of the ceremony, Stoddart criticised recent negative comments about Paisley by fellow local celebrities. Actor Gerard Butler said growing up there was akin to living in a warzone.
“It was like going into the land of the movie The Warriors,” he said. Singer Paolo Nutini, meanwhile, said the town was lost to “drink, drugs and gambling”.
“Telling the story of this town as a drug-infested hell-hole is an absolute lie,” said Stoddart. “They do this because it is chic to appear to have come out of a battle zone. The modern culture valorises all these dysfunctionalities. These people could just as well have mentioned the friendliness of the people in Paisley or the architecture that is being brought back from ruin. We have a university with a crack physics department with time booked in CERN [the European Organisation for Nuclear Research]. The point is, why is it that what we hear is all the negative? It’s because the negative is easy and glamorous.”
Stoddart was born in Edinburgh but raised in Elderslie before moving to Paisley in his teenage years. He studied at Glasgow School of Art and then Glasgow University before returning to Paisley in 1983. His sculptures and monuments are displayed around the world, from the recently unveiled statues of Adam Smith and James Clerk Maxwell in Edinburgh, to duplicate statues of John Witherspoon, the Scottish preacher who was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence in America, which stand outside his studio at the University of the West of Scotland in Paisley and at Princeton University in the US.
Receiving the freedom of his home town was unusual for an artist in Scotland, he said, and something he was delighted with. “It means, above all, the idea of being accommodated at last,” he said. “In the arts there is an expected mechanism that says to be esteemed in your own town one must go away.”
A critic of modernism, to which he ascribes the blame for everything from the architectural blight in Paisley town centre to a culture that celebrates the negative and violent, Stoddart’s work holds true to the classical forms of ancient Greece and the Renaissance. Books of the Italian sculptor Canova lie in his workshop. He reads Homer every day. He said that being able to refer to the 20th century, a period he ranks as the worst ever for art, as the “last century” gives him “a warm glow inside”.
His opinion of other contemporary sculptors reflects this. Of Anthony Gormley’s fourth plinth project in Trafalgar Square, Stoddart said it was “rubbish”. “He is a superannuated demagogue with no talent,” he added.
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