Life and times of artist and textile designer
childhood diaries to studio life
Roger Woods
Roger working on the Age of Lead 1995-6
Roger's schoolboy diaries.
A page of the Beano on hardboard.
Roger's schoolboy diaries.
Roger at the Royal College of Art
Lists of designs completed and receipts. Sketchbook
with plans for compositions.
When I discovered Roger's schoolboy diaries after he died I was amazed to find how many of his obsessions and preoccupations were already in place: his love of black coffee, alcohol, good food, smoking ( he was rolling horse chestnut leaves at 8), his hatred of sport and the glottal stop, his keen observation of fashion, both nostalgic and contemporary, a fascination with fire, his love of the English landscape and of friendship.
At the Royal College of Art where he was taught by Peter Blake, he wrote a thesis on the subject of: The Ideology of Superiority, A Social Study of Public Schools, a blow back at the bullying staff and boys he had met there.For examples of work he did see: Lost Works.
In 1974, married now to Celia and with a small daughter, Beatrice, he joined the Edwardian textile studio Hawards in Twickenham, where he met and worked with Bernard Nevill, then design director at Liberty’s, whose ecclectic English style of design set Roger off on a course of originating patterns which reflected his sense of fashion and combined various traditional genres in a new way.
He also taught at Oxford, where he could deliver, without notes, off the cuff lectures on art history and theory, and at Farnham. One of his projects was to get the students to build bodies from found objects. He then projected a renaissance painting over the figures and played tapes of Bach, or Hendrix while the students drew. They would set fire to the figures afterwards.
By the mid eighties he had begun painting several huge elaborate canvases, the series of mixed media figures and set up the company Ariadne Designs with his new partner Simone. He designed the first lifestyle furnishing fabric collections which were an immediate runaway success.
His favourite artists were: Duchamp, Rodin, Poussin, Francis Bacon, Jim Dine, Picasso, Braque.
The lyricism, anger, sense of loss and obsession with detail which appear in the early diaries were constant to Roger throughout his life and are present in his work.There are also numerous references to psychonalytic ideas and art theory which occupied much of his time,and a strong sense of the tension between an academic training and a radical sensibility, a nature which was often passionate beyond reason, but intellectually relentlessly objective.
He used attention to detail from an early age to divert himself from stress. For example, his 1954 diaries show intricate drawings of dentists drills. He had numerous treatments from the orthodontist, Mr Bell, and as an older boy distracted himself by observing the dentist's outfit:
Jan 6 1960:
I
must then journey to Bell, hoho, once again I see his dandy debonair figure, clad beneath his white coat in a white shirt, Van Heusen 15"inch collar, diamond pattern tie of blue and white edged with black, crimson waistcoat, worsted trousers, beige socks and brown shoes.
In later life he liked to dress in thirties style and wore his clothes with a mixture of panache and parody.
When his father left home, he was sent to Framlingham, a school he loathed, and comforted himself with recollections of home breakfasts and of the walks he had on holiday:
Nov23.
Once again, a hot brown egg is selected from the saucepan, rounds of warm, golden toast and farmhouse butter, honey, and a cup of percolated coffee from his stove. And now sitting in the study and reading the paper, Woody is lord of himself. But no. Mere fantasy. I must sit suffering in the grim dining hall.
1958 May 9
Every day now passes on in the grisly routine. I think of the swan glades and the
crackling bracken paths, pushing
through
the brambles into the river borders, the knotty apple tree trunks, and bluebird glens.
Chemistry and sport were his least favourite subjects:
Nov.1959.
Woody.. walks on the dewy grass with blackbird and sparrow at his head, the apple leaves gently pattering down and the early autumn sun shiny through. .. But how cold the pitch, how hard the ground, how horrible the huge rugger pill whizzing unerringly into Woody’s unwilling hands. Woody dispose of this and disappear into the murky depths of his dreams again.
Dec 7 th 1959
Monday morning starts..with a Chemistry exam, which was truly horrible.. However I amused myself drawing reactions, H-bombs and chemical explosions..
Most of his holidays were spent with his close friend Fergus, whose father Hulme Chadwick, the designer, and whose sister, a painter, gave Roger the starting points for his own dual career.
He escaped Framlingham, took his O levels at home and then worked briefly in a solicitor’s office, painting at nights, buying art books during the lunch hour and sometimes bunking off to go home and read. At last his mother gave in to his obsession and arranged for him to have an interview at Kingston Art School. The Head of Art, Frank Archer, took him on immediately, though term had begun, and Roger never looked back.