To read more articles by John-Paul Flintoff, click on the links panel below left

Does Antony Gormley do this all the time – or is he being odd just for me? I’m following the artist round his studio in north London, trying to write down everything he says. And each time we stop, Gormley takes his place at my shoulder – literally pressed against my shoulder – to talk amiably and invade my personal space. If we were packed inside a crowded train, I probably wouldn’t notice. But the studio is vast. If he were hard of hearing, I’d not think twice – but while we’re moving he manages to hold a conversation over considerable distance, heedless of the noisy grinding, cutting and welding of his workshop staff, so his ears must work okay. Is he trying to peek at what I’m writing in my notebook? Nope.

I should perhaps add that the proximity of Gormley – a tall man, with slightly round shoulders and oval specs hiding mild, milky eyes, and suspiciously black hair for a man of 57 – is not creepy or intimidating. It’s just a bit odd. But he could not possibly be unaware of personal space: practically everything he has done as an artist has to do with it. So his closeness can only be deliberate. Perhaps he’s using his body for the benefit of The Sunday Times Magazine: doing a show, creating an ad hoc installation.

His latest formal show opens this Thursday, at London’s White Cube Mason’s Yard, a space owned by Jay Jopling, the dealer who has presided over the careers of so many prominent modern British artists – Hirst, Emin, that lot.

“I’ve been meaning to do a show there for a while,” Gormley says, “but didn’t have time.” He found some time, hatched an idea, made up a model out of bungee cord, and brought Jopling along to have a look. “He said it was not as good as it should have been,” Gormley reports. “He basically said, ‘A load of crap.’ We were a bit depressed. We’d been very excited, in a childlike way. We’d got in a dancer to show how people could interact with it – actually bouncing against it. But Jay was worried that people don’t behave like that in galleries.”

I’m taken aback by his candour. Naturally, I’m aware that Jopling is immensely powerful, but I never expected to hear an artist reveal so openly how that plays out. Not good enough, sunshine. Go home and try again. And Gormley is not some newcomer. He’s about as successful as it’s possible to be. His books sell well. The Hayward gallery had to extend his last exhibition because it was so popular. Something like 33m motorists pass his 65ft-tall Angel of the North every year, and hundreds of thousands have gone to see Another Place, comprising 100 life-sized statues he embedded on the beach and in the sea at Crosby, Merseyside. His life-sized figures in cast iron, welded steel and other materials routinely sell at auction, according to Artnet.com, for between £100,000 and £200,000.

His commitments this year, besides White Cube, include designing the set and lighting for a dance event with Shaolin monks at Sadler’s Wells; installing a 48-metre man in the River Liffey in Dublin; putting up a 25-metre work in Holland; and shows in France, Spain, Australia, Mexico and Japan. And he’s pitching to take over the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square.

What was his response to Jopling’s slighting appraisal? “Oh, I’ll still do that idea somewhere. Jay isn’t the only…” He pauses. “I think it’s great that a gallery guy, a ‘gallerist’ ” – to use the most respectful name for a dealer – “should like the work.” (Jopling was not available for comment.)

And how did Gormley come up with the idea that did, eventually, impress his dealer? “My first thought was to take the Dublin statue” – a vast latticework of vaguely human appearance – “and jam it into White Cube, filling the space from one door to the other. You know, ‘F*** him!’ And then we thought, why not try an angular shape?” He shows me a sketch of a man sprawling in a tight space. “I had some reservations. I thought it was a bit obvious, and ‘narrative’. I don’t do the theatrical school of sculpture. Most of my work has definitely not been doing anything. They’re just hanging out, at rest. But Tristan was excited.”

Tristan is Tristan Simmonds, a serious young man from the engineering company Arup, who has been working with Gormley for 18 months or so. “I couldn’t do any of this without Tristan,” says Gormley, and, as with the Jopling anecdote, I’m struck by his absolute lack of self-importance.

He takes me to meet Simmonds upstairs, in rooms filled with neat filing and bureaucrats: the successful modern artist needs an efficient back office. Simmonds is frowning over a computer showing renderings of the White Cube installation. He talks me through them, from the original sketch of the sprawling man to a computer-animated version, then another that seems to be made entirely of bubbles, and the final product, hardly man-shaped at all, made of latticework. (It’s this, I realise, that I glimpsed being welded in the workshop on my way in.)

I can tell the pair have enjoyed effecting these digital metamorphoses, but can’t entirely see the point. Borrowing Gormley’s word, I ask why he bothers to “translate” the sketched figure into this form. “I have been interested for a long time in expressing the condition of the body rather than doing anatomy.”

Before we leave him, the young engineer shows me another clever animation, revealing how the parts must be conveyed into the gallery via a relatively teeny service lift – rather than the front doors – and in what order. Much of Gormley’s work these days has less to do with artistic dreaming than managing logistics: plotting schedules, getting planning permission, satisfying health-and-safety requirements.

Another Place, his group of 100 life-sized human figures installed on Crosby beach, was initially refused permission to remain there because when the tide is high, many of the figures lurk anything from 1ft to 24ft beneath the waves – not ideal for swimmers. (By public demand, consent was finally granted.)

And last year’s big show, Event Horizon, involved placing human figures on buildings around the Hayward gallery. Gormley had to fight hard to get approval, at one point telling a journalist, “The fighting I’ve had with the f***ing Hayward, about f***ing health-and-safety and risk assessment. I could kill them.”

Today, he’s less angry, but he does sound pompous: “I had quite a tussle. We got there in the end but I didn’t feel that it was a meeting of intellects. It was Ralph’s first show [Ralph Rugoff is the Hayward’s director]. I feel sorry for him. It was not simple to put things on roofs, or in the gallery, that threatened its weight-bearing capacity. And I have to thank Jay, because he came in with the money.” Perhaps remembering the tone of his earlier comments, Gormley improvises a paean to his dealer. “He has been amazing. Because in many ways I don’t fit into his category of conceptually provocative work.”

No, Gormley doesn’t do messy beds or bisected sharks. But he did once propose a 12-metre-high ejaculating man for the waterfront at Seattle. The figure was meant to give an 11-second ejaculation of sea water every five minutes. “I intended it as an ironic comment on the male figure in relation to the whole idea of a fountain, because everyone knows the fountain is a male fantasy of permanent ejaculation.”

Perhaps because that unusual fountain was not commissioned, Gormley has increasingly been exposed to the charge that his work is repetitive. If it wasn’t, Private Eye would not have found it so easy to send him up with its cartoons showing Gormley figures in odd situations. But why do so many people, particularly artists who enjoy less media coverage, sniff that Gormley is a “one-trick pony” when I tell them I am writing about him? Would they say the same about Matisse and his odalisques, or Constable’s landscapes? “One-trick pony” is a telling phrase: have we come to expect contemporary artists to be conjurors before all else, masters of the unexpected?

Another complaint levelled at him is that his figures are always moulded on his own body shape. This is incorrect, as we shall see, but even if it were true, to suggest an egotistical motive doesn’t ring true. It’s obvious that he doesn’t take himself seriously: he didn’t mind the appearance of bikinis and hard hats on the figures on Crosby beach, and actually seemed pleased when Newcastle United fans fitted out The Angel of the North with an Alan Shearer shirt. This pleasure stems from a clear distinction between the blank figures he creates and the conventional idea of a statue. “Traditional statues are not about potential,” Gormley explains, “but about something that’s already complete. They have a moral authority that is oppressive rather than collaborative. My works acknowledge their emptiness.” So we project our own feelings onto them and draw from them whatever we like.

“I get enormous encouragement from watching people react to my work. There are films on YouTube” – showing people wandering calmly among his statues, at Crosby beach and elsewhere. “It’s incredibly encouraging. There’s no prescription. They’ve found their own way.”

Before western specialisation gave us the idea of “artists”, he believes art was something that we all did. “Art has been taken away from people. That is the weird paradox of modernism. It promises to be accessible but ends up being esoteric and needs art historians and critics to explain it. Art goes up its own arse, looking for its own syntax, and forgets what it’s meant to do, which is to carry the energy of life.

“The challenge now is to offer back to people the same freedom that art took for itself. I love abstract expressionism; it showed it was possible to do anything. We don’t have to continue making perfect copies of gods and kings. Art can be a pure expression of forms of being alive.”

This was brought home to Gormley when he asked for volunteers to be moulded for the life-sized figures in Domain Field. More than 15,000 people turned up. “Many gave this strangely similar response when asked why they wanted to be a part of this art work, which was that ‘Art will make me immortal’. That in some way art cheats death. Whenever I go to Newcastle and do a talk, they say, ‘Where am I? Do I go to Lisbon? Am I going to Winchester? Am I all right? Have I got a broken leg?”

The seventh child of a millionaire businessman, Gormley grew up in a mansion in Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London. His Irish father, a devout Catholic who died in 1979, regularly used to beat the children (Antony has described his father as being “f***ed up”, but seems largely unbothered now). But Gormley père also passed on a love of art. He took the children to galleries after mass, and although he might have preferred that his youngest son become a banker, he encouraged his creativity.

At Ampleforth, the Benedictine boarding school in Yorkshire (where he was beaten still more), Gormley won all the art prizes. Then he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read archeology, anthropology and history of art. In 1971 he set off for India on the hippie trail. He was gone for nearly three years, contracted typhoid, studied meditation with a Burmese guru and considered becoming a Buddhist monk.

Many people have identified a Christian character to his work, particularly in The Angel of the North – an “angel”, after all, and spread-eagled like Christ on the cross. But I wonder whether eastern spiritual qualities may have been overlooked: each one of Gormley’s blank figures calls us back to an awareness of ourselves in the here and now, like so many statues of the Buddha. “As I get older,” Gormley confirms, “all the things I learnt in India from my Buddhist teaching and meditation are more and more true: the only place to live is in the present moment.”

It was in India that he decided to make a serious attempt at life as an artist. He returned to England in the mid-1970s, found a room in a squat in north London and went to the Central School of Art, before moving to Goldsmiths and then the Slade. In 1980 he married a painter, Vicken Parsons. They have three grown-up children, two of them artists. In 1982 Nicholas Serota, now director of the Tate, gave Gormley his big break with an exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery. The centrepiece was Mother’s Pride, a bed made from 8,640 slices of white bread that Gormley had eaten bits out of, creating a Gormley-shaped void in the slices.

But it wasn’t until 1993, when he teamed up with Jopling’s White Cube, that he could stop worrying about money. His older brother Michael has said one reason Antony’s career was comparatively slow to take off was that he didn’t really want it to. “Antony was self-consciously trying to make work that addressed issues he felt the public would wish to be engaged in, rather than a collector or the marketplace.” The breakthrough came when he handed control to other people. “I knew I had to get away from the idea of being the author, originator and subject.”

In practice this meant inviting people to his studio and asking them to form a lump of clay into a rudimentary head, and then – with a pencil – give it eyes “to make it conscious”. The extraordinary thing, he says, was that everyone found their own way of doing it. “The clay held the feeling, and took on personal mannerisms.” The eventual work, comprising rooms packed with tens of thousands of these “Gorms”, had an almost instant impact on the public and critics, and culminated in his winning the 1994 Turner prize – for something that, in large part, had been crafted by other people.

Gormley is uncomfortable about the idea of competition in art. Famously, and foolishly, he likened winning the Turner prize in 1994 to being a Holocaust survivor: “In the moment of winning there is a sense that the others have been diminished,” he said. (Later, after the inevitable complaints from Holocaust survivors, he said he regretted the comment.) He asks if I’d like a cup of tea, and while the kettle boils, he says, “What do you think of the plinth idea?” He’s talking about his own proposal for a monument to fill the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square: thousands of living volunteers taking turns to occupy the plinth for precisely one hour. I tell him I fancy being one of them, as long as I’m not given a night slot in winter.

“I’m glad there has been a good response,” says Gormley. “How positive and excited people seem to be about something so simple and stupid.” He stops, corrects himself. “I should say playful, because in the working out it becomes incredibly serious. It’s about a particular time, and a place that is already full of history, with the military figures on the other plinths, and protest.”

The idea excites him precisely because it calls to mind the collaboration that produced Field, as the 40,000 Gorms were more properly called. That Turner-prize-winning show looks back at him still, he says. “It asks, ‘What are you going to do about it now?’ It had an urgency about population and the imprint of humanity on the future of the planet. I don’t think anything else I’ve made has had the same challenging quality.”

If Gormley’s idea does win, he’ll have no trouble finding volunteers, because it’s hard to think of another British artist who has the same kind of following. But when I ask what he thinks it was that got him to the top of the heap, he says: “I’m not on top of any heap. The art world is still totally uncertain where to put me. It’s like I’m invisible or untouchable. Or awkward: it would be dangerous to declare a sympathy. Slightly naff.I don’t want to suggest I’ve not had enormous support from extraordinary individuals. But the high priests of contemporary art have been wary. And that’s fine. I don’t want this to sound like some kind of lonely-hearts ad for any errant art critics out there. It’s good to be misunderstood. You have the freedom to hoe your own row.”

Perhaps with this in mind, Gormley takes me up another flight of stairs into his own private studio-within-a-studio. There’s a kettle, a pair of glass tumblers, bookshelves, a postcard showing a Rembrandt self-portrait, and two huge tables on which stands a set of Japanese ink brushes.

He puts on an apron, then takes a vast piece of paper and lays it on the table. He washes dilute ink over it and picks up a sharp tool normally used for engraving on metal. Going ever so slightly more round-shouldered than before, he starts running the tool in circles over the paper, then figures of eight and other shapes. The work has a highly meditative quality: for a while he seems to have forgotten about me. We both just watch his hand going round and round the paper like a skater on grubby ice. Then he stops, washes more ink over the whole sheet and sets it aside.

I feel privileged to watch the artist at work, and more persuaded than ever that Gormley’s art, no less than his lofty form pressed up against your shoulder, should be welcomed as a kind of call back to the present moment.

“It’s really relaxing,” he says. “I just do it. I do them every day.” Then, as if embarrassed by the meaninglessness, or perhaps thinking of his stern dealer, he adds: “I throw a lot away. I’m doing all kinds of different stuff. One day it will all come together. This is helpful…” He goes quiet for a moment. “It’s like a cardiograph. I think of Pollock as being the artist who managed, in the great works, to leave behind the need to make a symbol or an image. What he was left with was about energy and space and just being. And that’s what I’m trying to do, in a clumsy way.”

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of 2008
• Hitler and the Downfall mash-ups
• Britney Spears: The Circus