MBE RA Claudette Johnson (English, born in 1959) was a founding member of the important Black British Arts Movement in the 1980s, but stopped making works in the 1990s. Encouraged by her friend and fellow artist Lubaina Himid, she reappeared in the art world after 2012, making her artistic comeback a surprising triumph that has culminated so far in her acclaimed solo exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London in 2023, and her nomination for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2024. Johnson creates mostly large-scale works on paper in which she portrays black women, including self-portraits, and men. Her portraits, intimate and analytical, are studies of character and visibility, displaying at the same time Johnson’s incredible drawing skills. Giving her subjects a dignity and inner strength, the artist is not interested in ennobling them, but, instead, wants them to share a universal experience of being human. The representation of black people has been problematic in Western art history, to say the least, as they were either absent or their depiction distorted, so Johnson’s aim was to give visibility and selfhood, and to correct the traditional art historical narratives.

Study for a Larger Work (2022) is a characteristic portrait by Johnson, depicting a black man in a relaxed but concentrated pose, looking the viewer straight in the eyes. Johnson’s energetic, recognizable gestural lines, made by pastels and completed by gouache, which she likes for its opacity, overlap, collide, and blur into one another. The artist notes that the multiplicity of lines is part of the journey of drawing, which involves “not erasing but retaining numerous re-sightings of the same form, each line taking us across the body’s terrain by a different route”. The scale of the work makes the figure almost life-sized, which again makes the contact with the viewer direct and honest. The concentration of blue with elements of violet, the density of lines, the play of light and shadow on the face and body, give the work vibrancy and the subject powerful presence.