Willie Rodger ARSA, 1930-2018

Born in Kirkintilloch, near Glasgow, Rodger trained in graphic arts at Glasgow School of Art. He worked as a commercial artist and taught art at secondary schools in Lenzie and Clydebank for over thirty years. Since 1956 he has worked hard to establish himself as a freelance artist.
Today Rodger is best known for his distinctive and humorous linocut and woodcut prints and pen-and-ink drawings. W. Gordon Smith, in the introduction to Rodger's exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh, in 1996, wrote: "His images dance to a very Scottish tune. They are fertilised by a sly humour, pawky and Burnsian, which by oblique observation of human frailty reveals the character of people we all recognise and, less comfortably, perhaps some things we would rather not know about ourselves."