This is one of the School Prints, commissioned and published by the Hepworth Wakefield. L Launched in 2018, School Prints is an ambitious five-year project to engage every primary school child in Wakefield District with contemporary art. Each year, the participating schools are gifted a set of limited-edition prints by leading contemporary artists for display in school and are supported with an in-depth engagement programme led by local artists to encourage creativity across the curriculum. Nicola Freeman, Director of Engagement & Learning at The Hepworth Wakefield, said: “The prominence and urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has brought into sharp focus the lack of diversity across the arts and museum sector”, and the artists were selected to increase diversity of representation. The Hepworth Wakefield scheme was inspired by the original School Prints initiative, a ground-breaking project set up in the 1940s whereby artists, including Henri Matisse, Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso, were commissioned to create prints specifically for schools to allow children to have direct access to high-quality art.

Claudette Johnson (b. 1959, Manchester is a visual artist whose works are mostly large-scale drawing and pastels that are both intimate and powerful. She was one of founding members of the BLK art group, established in Wolverhampton in 1979, and her work has addressed histories of figuration and the black body in European art. She has said of this print: ‘The print features an ink study of my three-year-old granddaughter on the day that she “assisted” me in the studio. She was helping me to paint primer onto a large sheet of paper that we had taped to the studio floor. She was dressed in a pair of my studio overalls and she sang a paint song as she worked. Her pleasure and concentration as she worked illustrated for me, the special alchemy of painting. It makes time stop and gives us permission to play.’