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| Claudette Johnson (b. 1959), photographed by Ingrid Pollard, Creative Boom. |
Claudette Johnson’s drawings of the human body have that sensational Lucien Freud meets Jenny Saville in a back alley collision course with perhaps some wicked hints of Egon Schiele (someone Johnson admires) in between. Johnson’s giant works are fleshy and sensual without the upfront salacious naked flesh. The implications are in the meticulous way light hits her figures, rendered to tantalize yet hide their secrets.
Claudette Johnson was born in Manchester, United Kingdom to Jamaican parents, her family being the first Black residents in the neighborhood. She studied fine art at University of Wolverhampton, received a post graduate degree in education at University of Greenwich, and participated in the
Blk Art Group— a collective effort founded by Midlands based artists Keith Piper, Marlene Smith, Eddie Chambers, and Donald Rodley.
“Their aim was to raise the profile of black artists and the Afro-Caribbean community through a series of sculptures, paintings and exhibitions. It was also an eye-opener for contemporary white artists as this political movement encouraged conversations on art reflecting culture and the state of how mainstream art did not include the experiences of the black population.”
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| Standing Figure, pastel and masking tape on paper, 159 cm x 132 cm, 2017, Hollybush Gardens. |
Johnson’s large scale, loosely rendered portraits of Black bodies take up ample space. Their strong, undeniable validity commands immediate notice. Through the explorative experimentations of pastels and gouache, playing with limited color palettes and line weights, her voluptuous forms dressed in contemporary fashion, break the rules by either defiantly engaging in the paper surface—sometimes leaving little room for negative space— or interacting with the negative space in a mathematical resolution. She maintains a gestural quality, marking down the contours of shapes and distinctive expression/impression of faces and clothes, testing presence and the state of completeness. The titles of pieces themselves are that of old art school tradition, nameless models and their typical poses. Yet the tenderness comes through Johnson’s clarity, identifying the characteristics of these undivided, what makes them different, what makes them similar, what makes them important.
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| Woman in Black (Trilogy Part Two), 1982-1986, Arts Council Collection, Apollo Magazine. |
In a
Creative Boom interview Johnson says of her show at Modern Art Oxford, “the feeling behind I Came to Dance was of rage. The kind of rage that makes you want to do something just to show that you can. I was angry about the way that black people in general and black women, in particular, were marginalised, underrepresented and misrepresented. The drawing is parodying what black women are expected to do ie. dance, but it is also celebrating dance as an act of survival. I wanted the white spaces in the work to be as active as the linear forms in the work. Symbolically, the fractured body in the drawing, containing only a curving line where the core of the body should be, speaks of the voids in our history, the loss of continuity of language and culture during the Atlantic slave trade. This is not the only possible reading of the work but it is where I started.”
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| Figure With Raised Arms, gouache, pastel, and masking tape on paper, 163 cm x 132 cm, 2017, Hollybush Gardens. |
Johnson’s work has been exhibited throughout the UK including at the Africa Centre and ICA London in London and the Black Art Gallery in Manchester, and the United States sucks as Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, New York. She is in the collections of Tate Modern, British Arts Council, and the Manchester Art Gallery.
She currently works and lives in London.
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