Chiselled from pastel: the work of Claudette Johnson

Claudette Johnson’s statuesque female figures occupy space. They do so confidently and without embarrassment. They fill the paper from which they meet our gaze. Frequently, they push out beyond the boundaries of the frame, uncontained and uncontainable. They are not subjects in any sense. The artist herself cannot impose her will upon them or constrain them within the conventional borders of her massive sheets of paper. They exist beyond the edges of the artist’s imagination. They push up abruptly against the borders of the picture, engaging us intimately and directly. They refuse, I imagine, politely, to be contextualised; to be surrounded by a landscape of the artist’s choice or to hold up props which would in some way define their identity. Put simply, they do not obey the established rules of classical portraiture. 

Claudette Johnson has steadfastly declined to furnish her figures (predominantly female ones until quite recently) with the customary symbolic tropes of traditional portrait-making. Her figures are deprived of any background setting or personal possessions which root them in some way, to a specific history or geography. She consistently describes them as ‘naked women’ (not nudes), thereby extracting them from a conventional art history of female representation. As a fine art student at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, Johnson struggled to find images of black women in the college library. As she and other artists of her generation discovered, there were few images of black women in the art history books because there is no significant history of such images in Western art. As Johnson acutely observes: “No-one was looking at us.”

Since the early 1980s, Johnson has been redressing the absence of black women from our collective imagination. She has been looking intensely at them with the penetrating and unflinching eye of an artist who is focused entirely on her task. Retrieving black women from invisibility and recuperating them into the canon of visual imagery, Johnson has given them presence through the medium of drawing and painting. Conjuring them into existence from soft pastels, gouache and watercolour, her women materialise lifelike and majestic from the flat surface of the paper.  

Working on a grand scale on works which are frequently 1.2 metres by 1.5 metres and significantly larger than life-size, Johnson draws immediately on paper and card. She rarely makes preliminary studies or sketches. Making her marks directly on the paper with her fingers, she draws the outlines of her figures and then pushes the pastels across the surface, leaving her fingerprints, traces of her hand on the picture plane. Sometimes, Johnson will leave small strips of masking tape on her pictures, residues of her starting point when she first approaches the vast, intimidating expanse of empty, unpopulated paper. Close to pure pigment, the soft pastels which are Johnson’s preferred medium, allow her to work quickly across the surface of the paper. She has to stretch up and across the expanse of the picture plane, elevating and contorting her body to reach the furthest corners of the paper. Her whole body is mobilised in the process of making and creating her monumental figures, demanding of her a physical intensity and dynamism of movement which is embodied in the final works. 

The soft pastels are frequently melded with gouache which meets and merges easily with the pastels. Johnson’s technique takes time: drawing the outlines of her figures, then blocking in areas of colour which she works over time and again with pastel and then with paint. Pigment might then be scrubbed away with sandpaper and the process of accumulating the colour in layers of pastel and paint begins again.  Built up in layers, Johnson’s women develop progressively into solid and imposing figures. Emerging gradually from a field of whiteness and silence, they command attention through their massive scale and voluminous materiality.

In Figure in blue (2018), the woman is still but Johnson has retained light traces of the movement of her arms over the time that she has been sitting for the artist. As in many of her works, the figure’s head has been rendered entirely in dark, monochromatic pastels, as if sculpted from bronze; the furrow of her brow and the small curls of her hair, articulated through light and shadow. Just below her shoulder, a section of her dress is a dazzling cascade of ribbons of blue paint – cobalt, azure, turquoise and navy.  The flamboyant swathes of fabric, fluttering and dancing in space, contrast with the woman’s quiet and introspective pose. Unlike Johnson’s earlier works, the sitter is not pushing out against the edges of the frame of these pictures. She is still and composed; confident and assured of her presence. A black woman, comfortable in her skin, she takes up pure white space; a monumental presence, chiselled from pastel.

© Gilane Tawadros, 2021.

First published in Claudette Johnson: I Came to Dance, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, 2019.