Claudette Johnson
1990
Pastel on paper
128 x 72 cm
This drawing is part of a group of works Claudette Johnson made of herself shortly after the birth of her second child. Her deft use of pastel to contour and model the forms of her body creates an image that is not only beautiful but also frank and direct. She has spoken of having ‘ambivalent feelings towards working with images of women who are naked because of the exploitative history of “nude” painting in art’. However, her ambition is to create drawings of women who ‘are so obviously engaged in creating themselves’ that they challenge and redefine those traditions, offering new ways of depicting Black women.