THE artist Willie Rodger f licks through a file of papers in the attic room that serves as his studio and office, and pulls out a drawing. It shows the graphic lines of a small but sturdy Victorian villa and, in the foreground, a tiny figure carrying a pail of hot ashes pushed far away from her body.

Rodger, who was 75 in March, made this drawing when he was just nine years old. The figure is that of his mother. The house is his childhood home in Kirkintilloch. He still lives there today, with his wife, the illustrator Anne Henry, tending a garden that is both romantic and, from the look of his vegetable patch, highly productive.

There was never any doubt about his love of drawing. "I think it was bit of a loner thing, but I always had great encouragement from my folks, " he says. To this day, he never travels without notebook and pen.

"It's a discipline. It comes very much from my mother, a milliner, who would always tell me that I was here to work, " he laughs. "It's the old Presbyterian, Calvinistic attitude."

Rodger's childhood drawing will go on show this weekend at the Auld Kirk Museum in Kirkintilloch in a retrospective show that celebrates his long career as graphic artist, printmaker, painter and inf luential teacher.

These days he is known as the first print-maker elected to the Royal Scottish Academy, "Scotland's master linocut artist", with works in collections from the city of Glasgow to the Victoria & Albert Museum. But as he admits with characteristic humour, his devotion to print-making was founded on struggle.

"I was the only one in the whole of my year at Glasgow School of Art to fail the subject, " he says. "I thought, 'Surely I couldn't be as bad that', so in my second year I took it again, and this time I was taught by the artist Lennox Paterson and he just sparked me off. So, having failed my first year, by the time I left art school I had sold prints to the V & A Museum."

From there, he went to London, and into the f ledgling advertising business of the early fifties. The exhibition includes a morose woodcut of his bedsit from that period, London Lodgings, which tells eloquently of his dawning realisation that he had made a mistake. "I had a room with just a brass bedstead and a wooden chair; I thought this was real artist stuff, but when it came to reality I realised I didn't like it. I hated the advertising world, even at that time it was a big rat-race. I hated London.

I missed the hills, missed the quietness of Scotland." So he returned to Scotland, to a career in teaching - he loved the children but detested the paperwork - and made his name as an artist and freelance designer. He developed his characteristic style - swift and striking line, wry observation of the human condition and bold placement of figures in blank space - working on commercial projects from book covers to beer mats and public commissions for ScotRail, the BBC and Historic Scotland.

Recently he collaborated with Liz Lochhead on her book of poems, the Colour of Black and White.

Since retiring from teaching in 1987, he has developed his love of painting worked in conte crayon, and seems gradually to have crept into the very fabric of the town of his birth. He has designed the bronze plaques for the Kirkintilloch heritage trail, contributed to the decor of his local pub and has worked with renowned stainedglass artist John K Clark on a series of memorial windows for St Mary's Parish Church.

He shows me his current project, designing two wooden angels for the church. They will cannily recycle some old pews. "Economical, was one of the first long words I learned, " he says. He learned it from his mother, and you sense his connections to previous generations mean a lot to him. His ancestors were weavers in the town; his grandfather a Kirkintilloch stonemason who cut his professional teeth in Chicago.

"We go back six generations, " he says. "I'm not a great adventurer; I like the quietness here." Within walking distance of his house are the f lat where he was born and his first marital home. His father ran a pawnshop in the High Street; his mother, the milliner, was good with her hands and had a head for business.

"My father was a Victorian, my mother was an Edwardian, my sister was from the twenties, I was from the thirties, " he says. "We were four different generations in the same house." And you can sense how in that household he developed his talent for watching and for wry observation.

This quietness, though, can't disguise his work ethic. "I get bad-tempered if I don't produce anything or if I don't get in the garden. That's the thing: hands in the soil or hands on my studio. I've got to work; I'm a peasant at heart."

And he looks out of the attic window at the garden he has known, worked and drawn for decades.

Willie Rodger, 75 Years On, Auld Kirk Museum, Kirkintilloch, from tomorrow until August 21.