Alexander Stoddart

Stoddart says of his own motivation, "My great ambition is to do sculpture for Scotland", primarily through large civic monuments to figures from the country's past. During this time he became increasingly critical of contemporary trends in art, such as pop art, and concentrated on creating figurine pieces in clay. Stoddart associates the lack of form in modern art with social decay; in contrast, his works include many classical allusions.

Stoddart's grandfather was an evangelical Baptist preacher, and his parents met through that church. He was born in Edinburgh, though his father, also an artist, moved the family to the village of Elderslie in Renfrewshire, where the young Stoddart immediately noticed the monument there at William Wallace's purported birthplace. Today, Stoddart lives and works in nearby Paisley. At school Stoddart became interested in music (and remains so) but decided he was not good enough to become a professional.

Stoddart went, aged seventeen, to train in fine art at the Glasgow School of Art where he studied from 1976 to 1980. There he settled on sculpture and initially worked within the modernist idiom. Stoddart has recalled an epiphany moment several times: when, after finishing a riveted metal pop-art sculpture (praised by his tutors) he found a bust of the Apollo Belvedere, "I thought my pop-riveted thing was rubbish by comparison. It's extraordinarily easy to pop-rivet two bits of metal together and extraordinarily difficult to make a figure like the Apollo, but I thought I had to try." Stoddart wrote his undergraduate thesis on the life and work of John Mossman, an English sculptor who worked in Scotland for fifty years. His work remains an influence on Stoddart. Stoddart graduated in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, first class, though he was demoralised by his peers' ignorance of art history: "the name Raphael meant nothing to them". He went on to read History of Art at the University of Glasgow. Afterwards, he worked for six "difficult" years in the studio of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Although Hamilton Finlay is considered one of the most important Scottish artists of the 20th century, Stoddart profoundly disagrees with his working methods: "Finlay was the godfather of a problem that's rampant everywhere today. He called the people who made his work 'collaborators'. What we call them nowadays is 'fabricators'. They're talented people who are plastically capable, but they never meet their 'artist'. They're grateful, desperate and thwarted." He is an Honorary Professor at the University of the West of Scotland. On 30 December 2008, it was announced that Stoddart had been appointed Her Majesty's Sculptor in Ordinary in Scotland.

In his own work, Stoddart has developed "heroic-realist" neo-classical representations of historical figures. Stoddart works as a civic-monumentalist for Scotland, and described the need his work fills thus: "We need serious monuments which don't have the Braveheart touch. If we're to be a nation, we need that. Fletcher of Saltoun is absolutely urgent if we're to show we mean business. We don't do it with a stupid Parliament building that looks like a Barcelona-inspired cafeteria. It's a bloody outrage." • Illustration — Statue of David Hume by Alexander Stoddart on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh He has made sculptures of David Hume and Adam Smith, philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, which stand in the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. Hume is depicted in a philosopher's toga, representing the timelessness of philosophical thought, a decision which was criticised as atavistic after the unveiling in 1996, though Stoddart remained stoic, "So here I discovered that the right thing, done in public, will often earn one great disapproval: a lesson for life – in the modern age at least." Local philosophy students soon began a tradition of rubbing the statue's toe to absorb some of his knowledge. Though Stoddart placed the foot over the edge of the plinth to encourage such engagement, the irony of the practice given Hume's critiques of superstition has been remarked upon. • Illustration — Statue of Adam Smith by Alexander Stoddart on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh Smith is, by contrast, depicted in contemporary attire, showing his concern for the practical matters of economic activity, a gown draped over his shoulder retains the connection to philosophy and academia. Smith's economic ideas are also encoded into the statue: the plough behind him represents the agrarian economics he supplanted, the beehive before, is a symbol of the industry he predicted would come. His hand, resting on a globe, is obscured by the gown: a literal presentation of Smith's famous metaphor of the invisible hand. The life-and-a-half size statue of Smith, is cast in bronze from a plaster model by the sculptor and was unveiled in 2008. It was funded by private subscriptions organised by the Adam Smith Institute. Stoddart's statue of James Clerk Maxwell stands in George Street in Edinburgh and a memorial to Robert Louis Stevenson is on Corstorphine Road. His monument to John Witherspoon stands in Paisley, with a copy outside Princeton University. • Illustration — Statue of William Playfair in Edinburgh (2016) There are several pieces by Stoddart in Glasgow's Merchant City quarter. Italia, a 2.6 metre, glass re-in-forced polymer statue on top of Ingram Street represents the contribution of Italian traders to the area. Classical in style, the female form is swathed in a chiton and carries symbols of ancient Italy: a palm branch in her right hand and an inverted cornucopia in her left. On John Street, a trio of figures, Mercury, Mercurius and Mercurial form a triangle. The first two, identical figures, sit above the John St. façade of the Italian centre; their English and Roman names signify the two different manifestations of the deity in Roman mythology. Here, they embody a "dialogue" between ancient lore and modern city life. Opposite, on a plinth on the street, stands Mercurial, cast in bronze and with the adjectival form of the name, it complements the duality of the other two with an underlying unity. Putative projects include a monument to Willie Gallacher, the Paisley-born Communist MP, championed by Tony Benn and funded by a public appeal and "Oscar", an amphitheatre carved into the rock on the Scottish coast dedicated to Ossian, the mythical Scot bard. In 2019 Stoddart made a 14 ft statue of Leon Battista Alberti for Walsh Family Hall of Architecture of the University of Notre Dame, in the United States, his single tallest work.

• Illustration — Heroic Bust, Henry Moore by Alexander Stoddart 1992 • Illustration — Bust of Thomas Muir • Illustration — Blind Harry