About Roy Kodani
My first art experience started at Hilo High School, located in the small, quiet, semi-rural town of Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii. My high school art class concentrated in drawing and ceramics. After high school, I attended Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and then studied law at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. 
I was an international lawyer with clients throughout Asia, continental U.S., and Europe, and during my travels in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, England, France, Switzerland, Italy, Japan, China, Korea, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Bali, Indonesia, and Cambodia, I had the opportunity of visiting art galleries and museums, which proved to be art lessons in themselves.
While practicing law in Honolulu, I attended evening art classes at University of Hawaii, Manoa Campus, and the Honolulu Academy of Arts. My real and enduring art lessons were taught on Sundays by a professional artist originally from Japan. He taught oil painting using the palette knife which I continue to do.
My oil paintings have been exhibited in several shows in Honolulu and some of them have won prizes. I have also sold my oil paintings, and I have been commissioned to do oil paintings.
My oil paintings are influenced by my study of world religions, philosophy, and literature. The depth of art as reflected in images is inevitably the teachings of spiritual leaders, thinkers, poets, and story tellers. The more you have learned from them, the richer the ultimate art is to the human vision.
Art is life. The image I set out to accomplish and the finished painting may not be the same. Thus, an oil painting in many respects is like life’s journey, traveling on the highway, often detouring to a by-way, and often wondering what the next bend in the road may lead. A wonderful and auspicious experience blessed with good fortune and befriending people with innate wisdom.
The Philosophy of My Art
Colors. The core of my oil painting is the Zen of Colors. The principal aim is to create an immeasurable aesthetic universe of images within the frame of the canvas. Painted thinly, thickly, layered. Consistently vibrant. A painting of vibrant colors is a harmonious musicality appealing to the vision, and more importantly, to the heart. The painting can be interpreted as the simplicity, or complexity, or the eternal mystery of life. No single or definitive answer. An answer, if any, is dependent on the consciousness of the viewer.
The art work may not be completely filled with colors in all its four corners. It may appear incomplete, vague, unfinished. This reflects the Asian concept of MA, negative space, an opportunity for imagination, continuation, depth in all its multiple meanings, eternal, a rhapsody of visual movement.
Artistic creativity in its true sense is freedom, serenity, an eternal quest for the Truth in whatever, whenever and wherever existence shall emerge.
From mankind’s earliest beginnings, art on the cave walls to the current computerized technological interpretation of life, art is the visual voice of humanity in all its human conditions. Always, always provoking emotion and thought. A sense of commonality speaking in a universal and time-honored language. Flowing. Oneness. Hope.