The Alchemy of Unconscious Drives
By Gareth Stevens
“Art is concerned with integrity, inner and outer … the resolution, at least symbolically, of the deep conflicts that occur in a creature condemned to inhabit two worlds at once, the natural and the symbolic.”
Roger Woods
It took seventeen years for Simone Witney to feel ready to archive, deeply explore and to gently launch the work of her late partner out into the world. Roger Woods, whose work is the subject of this book, was a long time resident of St Leonards. He graduated from the Royal College of Art, was a university lecturer, a designer and an incessant painter and writer. Alongside his industrious professional life he found time to produce over 800 paintings and drawings, only framed three of them and only ever exhibited once. Even close friends and associates had little idea of his stoic and rather secretive artistic life.
On reading this book I was not only moved by the elegance and precision of the authors’ prose, but also by an appreciation of just how much of an emotional and cathartic experience the preparation of it must have been.
The Alchemy of Unconscious Drives was co-authored by Simone Witney and Raymond McChrystal, and describes itself as “a three-way collaboration with Roger providing much of the commentary in his own voice”.
The book is simultaneously a beautifully constructed and forensic review of the art of Roger Woods, who died in 2002, and a eulogy to a lost partner and best friend. Its sublimity lies in the seamless way that it blends these two strands without recourse to any sentimentality. Although that is not quite true… whilst Simone and Ray give us an object lesson in how to write about art, this beautiful work is also underscored by a dignified yet restrained emotionality. Once you know of the writers’ loss, it permeates and intensifies every word and tells us of their resilience and determination to complete this last great gift to the departed artist.
The book is neither prescriptive nor didactic, rather it provides the reader with tools with which to appreciate Roger’s work, and is both speculative and exploratory.
Roger’s work is persistently about finding individual redemption in the context of what he calls “the crisis of modernity”. His luminous work gives form to space and an ethereal substance to the human body. His drawings and paintings lament the fact that humanity has lost any “proper consonance with human nature and desire of the symbols, values and institutions which mediate the relation of civilisation to nature.” By re-imagining Jungian archetypes within the context of Greek classicism, Roger splices ancient, more mystical states of being with iconic pieces of modern culture and art. By doing this he has created a means by which to push us to reconsider a nobler interior life and creates an oblique viewpoint on the fragility of human nature in our uncertain times.
The format of the book gives us a three-dimensional appreciation of Roger’s creative journey. Designed by Simone herself, it features not only exquisite full plates and details of a selection of his paintings and drawings, but also there are photographs of his pens, brushes and other equipment alongside some telling images of his studio and domestic settings.
In conversation with Simone it is clear that she has endeavoured to maintain a level of ‘professional’ distance out of a desire to give the book validity and for the work to be taken seriously. Of the book she says it is “my best attempt to honour the work and give it a start in life that is as true as I can get to Roger’s own intentions and sensibility.” She has achieved this admirably, but it is this background narrative which makes the book so compelling, touching and authentic.
Simone concludes… “Roger talked incessantly about art and psychoanalysis. I wanted to find ways to access that mindset as a way of elucidating the work and doing for him what he’s not here to do for himself.”
• If, like me, you want to pre-order a printed copy of this book or purchase any prints, please email [email protected]
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