Fame? I'd rather have my freedom

LUCY McKenzie hates the cult of celebrity, particularly as it affects artists - so she’s not going to go a bundle on me beginning this piece with a description of her mode of dress. But it is striking - sort of What Every Romanian Woman Wants - and hasn’t just been thrown together, so mentioning it can hardly be deemed frivolous.

It is a statement, or at the very least an anti-statement - the first of many. This is the girl who said "No" to Franz Ferdinand. I spot her from some distance away, standing in the doorway of her studio in her grey, militaristic jacket and matching mini skirt, tan tights and beige-brown boots. No one else in Glasgow looks like this today; possibly no one in Bucharest either, and certainly not at 10am.

She leads me into the building, just off Argyle Street: it’s a sturdy tenemental affair that, you guess, in a previous age, housed a sturdy trade such as drapery. McKenzie paints in a big, cluttered room shared with like-minded creatives. Locating a kettle under a piece of constructivist art, she offers to make coffee, but the milk is a week old. Do we want our artists to be locked into the tyranny of the sell-by date? Probably not.

McKenzie, 27, is one of Scotland’s brightest young artists, whose work has featured in the British Art Show, the Beck’s Futures and the Venice Biennale, but she’ll probably hate me all over again for listing these all-singing, all-dancing showcases as achievements. For her they were bad experiences.

"OK, not bad but soulless, compared to, say, working with friends and doing things like the illegal bar in Poland," she says. "We were invited to put on a show in Warsaw and we thought, instead of depicting something, why don’t we actually become it? So for a month we were this bunch of weird bohemian feminists running a bar we called Nova Popularna. We designed the interiors, of course, but we also served the home-made vodka from the countryside, cleaned up the vomit and the broken glass and dealt with the police when our bands upset the neighbours."

On the walls of the Saatchi Gallery in London, McKenzie is a neighbour of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. She has slagged off Charles Saatchi before (and herself for selling a painting - of the Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut - to the controversial patron when she was poor and didn’t know better). But the passing years have not blunted her ire.

"I’ve not been to the gallery, nor will I be going. It costs nine quid to get in. Once you sell work to Saatchi it’s basically in a coffin. A friend lost seven paintings bought by him in that fire [in a London art warehouse in May] and he was really happy. ‘They were sort of dead anyway,’ he told me."

THE EXHIBITION-cum-speakeasy in Warsaw was much more McKenzie’s kind of thing. She loves art but hates the art scene. She won’t be hyped, marketed, trendified, commodified, put in a box - and even though she probably loathes sound-bites as well, she has a way with words when describing her fierce individualism. "You have to be strong to escape the meat-grinder of the new."

She’s spiky, punky and challenging. An hour in her company can be inspiring; afterwards you want to paint something, preferably with an aerosol can, and the walls of one of the grim theme-pubs near her studio would make for a handy canvas.

In answer to the question, representatives of the Glasgow arts scene are always being asked these days - "Where were you when Franz Ferdinand were perfecting their winklepickered cool?" - McKenzie reveals she’s known lead singer Alex Kapranos, and seen him play in bands, for 13 years. So when the Frannies performed an early gig in her studio - another of those now-legendary "happenings", similar to the ones at the art-school rockers’ former base, the Chateau - she never envisaged them having a brilliant year of gold records and Mercury Music Prizes.

"I couldn’t see it," she says. "They were talented but they got really lucky." McKenzie was offered the chance to design their album cover but turned it down. "I’ve no regrets about that, I just didn’t feel up to doing something that was going to get that much attention - and look how big they’ve become. I mean, they’ve even spawned a haircut."

She wishes the band well, but, typically, this is done with attitude. "They’ve benefited from their art-school associations so I’d like to see them put something back into the city. Why don’t they buy the Chateau? They’re being a bit hypocritical otherwise."

McKenzie has ended up creating one record sleeve, a classic, pop-up gatefold affair for a compilation of the bands who woke up Warsaw playing her vodka-bar. I am tempted to say it reminds me of hoary old Jethro Tull’s Stand Up LP but quickly realise this will mean nothing to her.

Of greater significance are the new paintings awaiting uplift from her studio - destination: Boston. Malcontent and Mates will be exhibited in the city’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, the latter having been inspired by a condom advertisement.

"The ad was like this constructivist Mondrian painting and I saw it in the gents of a club," she says. There’s only a split-second to ponder what she was doing in the men’s toilets before she explains what’s happening in the piece. "It’s two robots f*****g in the missionary position."

Would I have worked this out for myself, eventually? You always like to think so. McKenzie distrusts galleries which demystify paintings but she’s not exhibited, in any form, in her home city. "There’s no interest in my work in Glasgow," she says.

In view of the recognition she receives beyond these shores, this is surely an oversight; and it’s all the more glaring when she reveals she’s been commissioned to create some public art in Dusseldorf and is thinking about doing a gable-end. Doesn’t Glasgow have a long and fine tradition of dressing up the sides of its houses?

This is the city’s red-light district, and when McKenzie cycles home after painting until 3am, she must weave a path through prostitutes, drunks and other nocturnal types. "It’s like being inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting," she says of her surroundings. But the block may soon be converted into flats and the tenant with the haircut-in-progress - less Franz Ferdinand, she says, more David Sylvian - would miss the place despite everything.

"I could put up with the mediocre culture we’ve got," she says, "the crappy chain pubs and the shit TV, the general rubbishness of Britain - I would tolerate all of that if it meant genuine civil liberty and I could go somewhere and drink all night or take over a building and get on with what I wanted to do. But it’s just so hard not to break the law... "

MCKENZIE, YOU will have gathered, wants to stay in the scratchy underground. In spirit and, you think, if it could be arranged, in person, too. But aren’t there benefits to being acquired by Saatchi? Apparently not.

I didn’t know her work until a recent visit to the Saatchi Gallery, and despite her Olga Korbut having to jostle for attention with Hirst’s shark and Emin’s bed, it’s one of the more affecting pieces in the riot of Britart. But when I compliment McKenzie on the painting she is unimpressed.

"When your work is displayed somewhere prominent you get a lot of attention, but it’s all from art tourists who don’t want to talk to you about your ideas and maybe question or criticise them, but just tell you your paintings are... nice."

No matter how the question is asked, fame - even just increased recognition - has no allure for her. "I’m not enrolling in the Peter Mandelson School Of Self-Promotion," she declares.

Surely Hirst and Emin are good company, though? "Icons of mediocre British culture... rich, houses in the country and cashing in on an imagined past that’s a clich of working-classness or femininity. Britart... ‘I was there, did all those things, took all that coke’ - it’s so embarrassing.

"No," she says, finally, "I can’t underscore enough the irrelevance of Saatchi to my life. Having my painting in his gallery is like a stone in my chest. I met him once, told him he’d bought a piece of my work. Do you know what he said? ‘Oh you’re Lucy! Yes, very nice painting, but don’t you live in one of those awful places like Glasgow?’

"I was young, I was stupid enough to sell to him, and I thought that was what the art world was like. Now I realise it can be anything you want it to be."

We walk outside, back into the Bosch painting, but Glasgow, for now, is quiet. The painter - don’t call her ‘Franz Ferdinand artist Lucy McKenzie’ and certainly not ‘Saatchi artist Lucy McKenzie’ - gets back on her bike. Her ultimate destination may be uncertain, but she’s definitely pedalling away from the "meat-grinder of the new". I shout after her to buy some fresh milk.