An extract from an essay written by me for Lizza Littlewort. The full text can be read in her catalogue, for sale tonight at Whatiftheworld at her and Willie Saayman's show, How The Troubles Started.

Although Frankenstein’s poor creature does not appear in a single of Lizza Littlewort’s paintings, his ghost (if the brute could be said to have one) hovers over this body of work. Popular culture has interpreted the demon as lumbering, dull and bloodlusty, but his original portrayal in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or a Modern Prometheus was as a rational, delicate but torn soul. Lizza’s work reflects this. It is an offering of paint on canvas, while it questions the assumptions behind the culture of painting. Lizza plays with the grand paintings, grand gestures and grand feelings and teases those who lap these notions up. She makes fun of their market relationship, while trying to explain how this relationship came into being. Frankenstein’s beast’s presence lingers in the mockery that is apparent in her work. It can be smelled in the way it is a parody through imitations. It can be sensed in the philosophical and ethical questions. More specifically Lizza queries the particularly vile gift of Romanticism, the genius and his search for the sublime, a trope that continues to haunt us. Frankenstein’s creature, born into the era of Romanticism, is a mockery of it, too. He’s the dirty backend of the Romantics, educated, erudite, but denied humanity. He’s an imitation of life.

The part of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that best explicates this is when her unnamed and wretched monster tells of his education. It’s a tale told to Frankenstein in a lengthy apology for murdering the scientist’s brother. Wandering in the woods near the cottage, from whose inhabitants, unbeknownst to them, he has learned language and compassion and whom he has been protecting, the creature discovers a leather portmanteau. Inside he finds three books which nurture his mind: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, and Dante’s Paradise Lost. From these pillars of European culture he learns of his emotions and of his Otherness.
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