Honolulu Harbor, Pau Hana   21 x 28.5

Shown in the first ever Art Center Faculty Staff Exhibit

at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Linekona

January 4, 2010 to January 29, 2010

Opening reception:  Friday, January 8, 2010, 5:00 PM

Roger is standing in front of a very large giglee (a fine art reproduction) made from one of his works with his permission.  The giglee, printed on canvas, hangs in the lobby of the new Hilton Grand Waikikian Hotel in Honolulu.  The original work, three 21 x 28.5-inch panels, was commissioned by the Hilton and is displayed elsewhere in the hotel.

On Friday, April 3, 2009, the Hawai’i State Senate hosted “Art in the Capitol,” a reception for artists who had works of art in Senate offices. Here Roger is pictured with Sen. Brian Taniguchi, who organized the event. 

In 1967, the Hawai’i State Legislature passed the Art-in-State-Buildings Law. Hawai’i became the first state to set aside one percent of the cost of state buildings to acquire and commission works of visual art, which are then placed in or around state buildings to beautify and humanize the built environment. There are now approximately 5,000 works of art in the collection—including well over 100 in State Senate offices.  

Roger, who has seven works in the State’s collection, has a 1995 abstract watercolor currently hanging in the Senate Ways & Means Conference Room. It’s appropriately called “in some kind of trouble.”

from Honolulu Magazine March, 2008 by Andrew Rose

ROGER WHITLOCK

One of Nine Artists to Collect

BORN: Seattle LIVES: Kaimuki CURRENTLY: Instructor of watercolor at the Honolulu Academy Art Center. Watercolors available from $95 to $5,000 at The Gallery at Ward Centre; Fine Art Associates, Honolulu; Cedar Street Galleries; and the Kirsten Gallery, Seattle.  http://www.gwcfineart.com/ga_whitlock.html

SE, Manoa Road, morning, 2007 watercolor, $750.

Roger Whitlock’s watercolors—you may have seen them at Queen’s Hospital, the Halekulani, HECO and Chef Mavro—are disarmingly gorgeous. Watercolor is considered by artists worldwide the most unforgiving medium because of its immediacy; Whitlock takes this challenge and, through quick brushstrokes, makes easy work of it by his virtuoso blending of foreground and background, information and materials. Like the master chef who reinvents steak or potatoes, he mixes up something fresh and ethereal while using old standards like rain on a street or sun across a vineyard. “It’s all about the light,” he says, “about the way it can make you see any subject, even the most mundane, in a new way.”