Willie Rodger RSA is one of the most significant artist-printmakers in recent Scottish art history.
Born in Kirkintilloch, Willie Rodger RSA decided at the age of five that he would become an artist, after his best friend’s drawing of a canal puffer was selected for hanging on the classroom wall and his was not. The gentle support and encouragement of Bob Allison, Rodger’s Art Master at Lenzie Academy, nurtured his talent and successfully prepared him to enter Glasgow School of Art in 1948.
There Harriet Hansen, George William Lennox Paterson, and Ted Odling were instrumental in honing Rodger’s draughtsmanship and introducing him to the then still unpopular opportunities of printmaking as a means of original artistic expression. Rodger famously failed his lino-cutting course in his first year. Graduating with a DA in Commercial Art in 1952, Rodger was awarded a Post Diploma year before moving to London where he joined Mather and Crowther as a Visualiser.
Unable to adapt to city life he returned within the year to Scotland, took his teaching qualification, and found himself Assistant to his former master at Lenzie Academy. In 1968 he was appointed Principal Teacher of Art at Clydebank High School where he enjoyed the support and encouragement of the Rector J.T. Robertson, of the recently appointed Art Advisor for Dunbartonshire Bill Wright RSW, and of a departmental team that proved a successful blend of youth and experience. He had the privilege too of teaching some extremely gifted individuals.
In 1987, feeling burdened under increasingly meaningless bureaucracy at the expense of front-line teaching, Rodger resigned to concentrate fully on his own artistic practice which, alongside family and garden, he had juggled throughout his teaching career. His contribution to printmaking was recognised with his election to the RSA as an Associate in 1989, rising to full Academician in 2005. He was elected to the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in 1994, and the University of Stirling awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in 1999.