St Leonards and Venice have something in common. Both towns are struggling with the conservation of murals that street artist Banksy has created on their walls. In Venice his mural, titled Migrant Child (2019), is painted on the wall of a building along the Rio Novo canal in the heart of Venice’s Dorsoduro district. It depicts a child holding up a flare and wearing a life vest. The Banksy mural in St Leonards was painted in 2010 onto the back of a concrete stairway leading down to the beach. It shows a small child in sunglasses building sandcastles, each labelled with the word ‘Tesco’. Because of their sites, both murals are now under threat due to environmental factors. 

In May of this year, while walking along St Leonards seafront, I popped my head over the railing to look at the Banksy, and was concerned to see that the image was no longer visible. At beach level I could see that the mural had been covered with Perspex. Sea water and rainwater are now getting behind the covering and causing major problems. Some of the water is penetrating the concrete and causing a reaction resulting in staining seeping out from within the wall onto the image. Other water is condensing on the inside of the Perspex and causing the cycle to continue. The image has deteriorated and is threatened with more of the same. 

In June I went to see our local councillor, Tony Collins. He was very quick to raise the matter within the relevant council departments. The response boils down to the fact that the council has neither money nor resources to deal with the situation effectively. Attempts have been made to prevent erosion by pebbles, and the Perspex is to protect it from graffiti and rain. As it is hardly visible as a Banksy anymore, the graffiti appears incognito. 

Since raising my concerns in June, the council have now completely covered the mural with a sheet of plywood. This, to my mind, will only make matters worse, as sunlight cannot then drive away the moisture. I have tried to contact the Banksy Collective by sending them pictures and a description of what is going on. 

At banksy.co.uk  you can click ‘outside’ on the sidebar, and the St Leonards mural is the 49th image. You can also appreciate from the photograph, presumably taken by him at the moment of completion, how much it has deteriorated. I am a paper conservator by profession, so I spend my working life saving deteriorating and damaged artefacts. It concerns me to see a work like this suffering such damage and neglect. 

In Venice, the moral arguments about the importance of Banksy’s work, as against his intention to place the mural in a deliberately challenging environmental position, have ended with a stalemate. Tourists’ requests for boat trips to include the Rio Novo canal prove how popular it is, yet the wake from the boats is now a major cause of its erosion. Save it, or let it fade away? 

“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 simonevw.2014@gmail.com
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Colm Toibin has spoken of Seamus Heaney’s “always crediting the miraculous” as a reason for Ireland’s deep mourning for him. Heaney commands an affection too for his deep connection with landscape, the people he loved and his creation of meaning, simultaneously particular and fluid, through a craft so fine his poems slip by the self-conscious mind and affect the reader with immediate intensity. By such means we access the miraculous.

In the current Stains and Traces show at the Hastings Arts Forum, Raymond McChrystal has made these ideas central to his curation. Its sub-title: ‘the presence or absence of the figure’, while at first glance self-cancelling, sets up a tension of opposites which allows the artists to create meaning through a subtle play of craft and freedom.

The figures who are really present are deities – Aphrodite and Hermes take a powerful place at the entrance. Both appear in Raymond McChrystal’s beautiful exegesis of discipline and fluidity. Roger Woods recreates Aphrodite in his light-strewn reworking of Greek statues, and Frances Bristow’s superb sculptured Shakti figures are elegant, ambiguous monuments to sensuality. As goddess of emergent life she is there in Nicola Jackson’s ‘Forest Green’, which hums with organic life, and she strides forth with her son Priapus in the vigour of Adrienne Hunter’s leafless trees, the vibrancy of Agnieszka Dabrowska’s blazing landscapes, the tactility of Victoria Kiff’s figures. She is in the eternal sand of Lesley Barker’s painting (there’s even a mirror) and in Robert Cross’ tender re-imagining of scenes from the film L’air de Paris which by the sensitivity of wash and line are translated into layers of memory.

Hermes, god of the adroit, the innovative, is present in the relationship of craft, sensibility and meaning which is a strong theme throughout. As traveller too between the worlds of life and death, oppositions are his metier. As guardian of souls, he flickers through the cuts of Emily John’s finely worked imagery. While her ‘Shadow Collector’ honours Hermes, Dan Pearce’s satanic scenes with their scarcely contained fires point to his demonic aspect. Yet he’s there too in Lucy Philips’ delicacy of response to her parents slipping away from life, their presence in the world remaining in the memory of slight touches, such as a bird in the hand, a winding of clocks that no longer track time. He is present in Jim Roseveare’s subtle concrete preservation of soft shavings and gentle detritus: things which once had a role in life. And they both inhabit the dark, velvety charcoal growth of Jo Welsh’s ‘Teratoma’. 

The show is a fine exploration of visual mythopoetic languages. Catch it if you can.