Drawings on a White Background
Lizza began her art career making huge oil paintings of Cape Town’s small-town art brat pack in a show called I Want to be Famous, which simultaneously swooned and sniggered at the construction of fame in contemporary art. The experience of making and selling this work, meeting collectors, and encountering the values and vanities, tackiness and tedium which bankroll the art world, gave her a lot to think about during the ensuing months. Depression, disillusionment and frustration followed, spiralling her into a abyss she didn’t hope to come out of. But down there somewhere she found herself chortling in the dark, and this resulted in a cartoon series called Drawing on a White Background, in which she began to make explicit in an arsily unarty way her internal dialogues with making art. This medium enabled her to work quickly through a variety of thoughts, and set up the satirical direction she has since taken. A selection of these cartoons appears here.
