Peter Ross at large: An artist who sees Atlantis where others see only a plook

As it enters its early fifties, the town is a national joke – Scotland without its make-up on, its curlers still in. How refreshing then to walk its streets in company with a man who sees beauty where others see none.

Brian Miller, who has white hair tied in a pony-tail and eyes of robin egg blue, was for 28 years the official town artist. When Cumbernauld was being constructed, he was an integral part of the process, called upon to create sculptures, friezes in the foyers of flats, and bright murals within underpasses. He provided the colour amid the concrete, and his appointment in 1962 was symbolic of the planners' utopian vision. Cumbernauld was to be the "town of tomorrow" – a landscaped heaven for workers and their families escaping the choking Glasgow slums. It was natural that there should be an artistic dimension to all this, and so Miller, an idealistic young bohemian, found himself hired.

Aged 74, he still lives in Cumbernauld but the town is now regarded as more of a dystopia. It has twice won the Plook On A Plinth award for the most dismal town in Scotland – "To me the real ugliness is in the people handing that out," Miller says – and was last week earmarked for a multi-million-pound regeneration project. Miller, however, carries in his head the way the town could have been. His Cumbernauld is an Atlantis of the mind – a beautiful dream submerged in fathoms of memory.

Miller lives in a boxy house in a concrete terrace with his wife Mae, a genius at soup. The toilet is decorated with vintage film posters, the living room shelves stuffed with books and old toys, and through the back is the studio in which Miller presents me with a slide-show on his life and the years in which Cumbernauld was his blank canvas.

He grew up in Riddrie and went to Whitehill Secondary where he spent his days doodling robots on the jotter of his classmate, Alasdair Gray. He left at 16 to become an apprentice engineer. One workmate was forever dashing off Jackson Pollock-style paintings during his tea break, and through him Miller became a member of an art club in Glasgow run by JD Fergusson, the famous Colourist and china of Picasso. Miller had some success as a painter and sculptor during the espresso-fuelled 1950s, and was covered by The Scotsman in an article headlined 'Paris On The Kelvin'.

In the early 1960s, he joined the planning department of the Cumbernauld Development Corporation which exerted a gravitational pull on lefties and proto-hippies from around the world. "Everyone had a fire in them that things had to and could change for the better," says Miller. It was informal and open to ideas, with cricket at lunchtime and volleyball after work. Lots of drink, too, and – one gets the impression – plenty of sex. Mad Men in North Lanarkshire. "My first time in Cumbernauld," Miller recalls, "I saw a naked woman cross her windows and look out at the woods, and I thought: 'This would be a good place to live.' She was one of the architects' wives. I felt like I was in a Swedish film."

Miller had been an introvert when he lived in Glasgow. In Cumbernauld he decided to reinvent himself as an extrovert. New town, new personality. It helped that he was having a grand time working on a grand scale. "I really treated the housing area as a big painting." He loved being part of the community he was helping create, and even taught sculpture to teens at the Saturday night youth club run by the Church of Scotland, the Kirk-a-Go-Go.

Mostly, his public works received a favourable response. People would come up while he was painting abstract designs on garage doors and suggest more blue or a wee bit green, depending on their football allegiances. There was a stooshie when he created 'The Carbrain Totem' – a phallic sculpture near a road bridge – and on another occasion a woman had to be sedated when Miller painted psychedelic patterns on the wall at the bottom of her garden.

Cumbernauld Town Centre, the brutalist shopopolis at the heart of the town, is widely disliked and in 2005 topped a TV poll to find the British building most deserving demolition. In the late 1960s, Miller and some architect friends, plus a coffin-maker from Kilsyth, took premises and opened a Biba-style boutique selling fashions and inflatable furniture. How did it do? "Two divorces and a bankruptcy."

We walk out to look at Miller's work. Much has been demolished or painted over. The Totem still stands, its tip frosted with snow, but a mural of doves on the gable end of a run-down block has seen better days – discoloured, graffitied, bisected by a satellite cable, and badly scorched. It's a sight Miller is sad to see. "It's a strange feeling. That should really be repainted. It's like out of another time, another world when things could get done. It says something about the lost hopes and aspirations of everybody who came to the town."

He blames Thatcher's cuts for ruining the Cumbernauld dream. Plus, Thatcherism had a subtler influence – the gradual erosion of community spirit and civic pride, fatal for a community which had shallow roots from the start. Still, there's an optimism to his mural, and it hasn't entirely lost its power. Maybe it's the transforming power of snow, or perhaps because I'm seeing Cumbernauld through Miller's eyes, but the place does have a certain magic. So when he talks about a grim stairwell looking "Scandinavian" or compares the columns of a traffic underpass to a Greek temple, it doesn't sound like hyperbole.

Does he think, then, that Cumbernauld, for all its faults, has a bad reputation it doesn't deserve? "Of course it does," he says, eyes sparkling beneath his black cap. "But then we all do."