by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

I dropped in on the famous sculptor Armand Vaillancourt in honour of his ongoing exhibition at the old Gazette building on St-Antoine, but really I wanted to meet up with one of Montreal's most legendary characters. After a quick handshake, he scoots off to the buzzer to do damage control about a newspaper report claiming that he'd married the luscious Mireille Chéry, an art dealer about 45 years his junior. The never-wed Vaillancourt is concerned that it might upset his girlfriend of 20 years. "Thankfully she's not the jealous type," he worriedly reports.

Vaillancourt built a maverick reputation by carving up a dying tree on Durocher 51 years ago, and he displays an endearing preoccupation with others' feelings. He practically apologizes for being a sovereigntist. "I'm with the UFP, I'm too far left for the PQ," he says. Vaillancourt, at 75, says he was in the front lines of the projectile-tossers in the Quebec City anti-globalization demonstrations.

Our isle is home to plenty of alluring digs but a trio beckon sufficiently to make me yearn to enter: the overgrown cottage at Victoria and Côte-St-Antoine, the little duplex in Ville Émard where Mario Lemieux's parents live and Vaillancourt's fenced-off art palace on Rachel and Esplanade, with its yard full of tree stumps and ancient industrial equipment.

Vaillancourt, sometimes described as the world's grandmaster of intuitive art, lives amid items ranging from abandoned industrial machinery to a gnarly tree stump he borrowed from Lafontaine Park after the ice storm. He hauled it off in a truck and hung it from chains. "I never ask for permission," he confides. He points to what remains of his antiwar statue that once stood beside the Lavalin building. When it came time to move it, he trucked it to the Old Port where it stood for years. Nowadays it's partly disassembled and jammed into the corner of the courtyard.

Vaillancourt's best-known work is probably a public monument in San Francisco that made the cover of Newsweek in 1973. More recently he was honoured in the Magdalen Islands, and spontaneously erected an eye-catching wood wall in a field, tethered to massive steel cords. "What was I supposed to do while I was there, stand around and do nothing?"

The 16th of 17 farm kids had fathered six girls with assorted women before siring a boy 12 years ago with his current flame. We stop frequently in the fluorescent-lit house he bought for $83,000 in 1979 as he shows off art done by his children and others he sometimes teaches. One of his small metal statues gets rented to corporations for five grand a year, raising over $60,000 for kids' charities.

Part of Vaillancourt's persona is his trademark long hair, which contributes to him looking decades younger than his years. Fashion glossy Ocean Drive even featured him as a male model in a front-page photo shoot at age 68. Vaillancourt was a pioneer of long hair and he was once physically assaulted downtown for his locks. "I knocked the guy out in one punch," he says. Vaillancourt believes the city's first longhaired man was "an organ grinder who sat outside The Bay. He was a beautiful old man."

Vaillancourt's ex's include Suzanne, whom he was with when she was platonically serenaded in buddy Leonard Cohen's most famous song. "She just wrote me a long e-mail a few days ago," says Vaillancourt, who furrows his brow while saying the word "long."

Indeed, Vaillancourt disdains the written word, a daring indulgence in a world where no art can be justified without an incomprehensible stream of arcane verbiage. In an upstairs room piled high with banker's boxes full of writings about his works, Vaillancourt confesses that that he hasn't read John Grande's biography of him, nor the Réfus Global, that anti-clerical manifesto considered the bible of his generation. "I just don't have the time," he says. But like a compassionate chess player of human courtesy, he avoids a potential distant wound, adding, "But if you write an article about this day, I'll make sure to read it."

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