Roger Woods
In Rodin's Studio a metaphor for the unconscious or internal world of the artist text by Roger Woods
Some of the earlier works are more or less straight studies after Rodin’s sculptures, done to familiarise myself with the atmosphere and style of the work. The compositions depiciting figures in the studio evolved more slowly with many false starts and failures. Some seem self sufficient and need no further elaboration in bigger oil paintings, whilst others will be developed at larger scale. The technique had to be flexible to accommodate changes of mind whilst working, and there were many of these, despite having done
many small compositional and figure studies. I have used mainly gouache in a kind of tempera style, moving back and forth between transparency and opacity. I can see many years of work ahead on this theme.
These works on paper are studies towards a set of larger paintings on the theme of Rodin’s studio. None are literal or historical versions, but reworkings of the themes as a kind of fantasy. What particularly appealed to me, apart from my great admiration for the sculptor (the greatest, perhaps, since Michaelangelo) is the way that the subject of the figure could be treated in a varied way suggested by Rodin’s practice, whilst also finding a metaphor for the unconscious or internal world constantly at work in any authentic form of artistic expression. Particular ideas include exaggeration and ellusion, anatomical distortion, the fragmentation of parts later reassembled, sometimes from different figures, wild disparities of scale and focus, and the treatment of movement in the late drawings and watercolours. The props and architectural features form semi-abstracted details and spaces evoking Rodin’s studio at Meudon with its characteristic domed windows, though there are all manner of images from other sources as well as the photographs compiled by Albert Elsen’s book’In Rodin’s Studio’