BY Beverly Cramp
Galleries West, 2006

In her quintessential art studio located in one of Vancouver’s Gastown heritage buildings, Angela Grossmann gingerly steps around piles of unfinished artwork. The floor is splattered with paint, as are many of the other surfaces.

Taped on the walls are large, figurative paintings. There’s a pubescent girl with long legs and striking red hair. Another is of a childlike girl posing in a frilly pink dress several sizes too large, wearing matching pink lipstick on her sassy, puffed-out lips. Next to it is a portrait of an adult man with his scarf flying off, a flower in his lapel.

Who are these people, and what is their significance?

The figures Grossmann creates are put together from thousands of different sources, she says, including photographs, scraps of material and other found objects. “They aren’t based on any human models. They are really more like theatrical characters in a play.”

The theme of many of her current images, says Grossmann, is the transition period of puberty, when a girl is aware of being looked at.

“At that point she loses herself to herself. She becomes somebody defined by the way others see her. And we all know what being defined by the way others see you means — the perception that you’re being observed, judged and measured for the edification and pleasure of males, and also sized up in terms of your worth by other females, and by society at large. At that point, gorgeous is what girls want to be. They aren’t sitting there thinking ‘I have a great brain, I want to be a scientist.’” Boys, says Grossmann, are freer of this and have no sense that they are here for pleasure and entertainment. “It’s a horrifying thing for girls to come to terms with. I’m not preaching; it’s an observance.”

These are bewildering times for Grossmann, who grew up in the women’s movement. Role models for girls have never been worse, she says. “I thought after the women’s movement that it was impossible to go back.”

Grossmann calls her current show of paintings and mixed media at Vancouver’s Diane Farris Gallery Paper Dolls, “mostly because the work is on paper and because the figures seem doll-like,” she says. “It’s not about me taking sides, or pointing fingers.”

Paper dolls were Grossmann’s favourite toys growing up in a family of artists in England. Her father was a graphic designer and her mother was a portrait and medical painter. “After dinner, instead of TV, we would get out our drawing boards. Our mother used to make us paper dolls and we would make their clothes. It really fueled the imagination. I always drew, it’s just like thinking for me.”

Grossmann immigrated to Canada in the 1970s. She initially resisted following her artistic urge. “I didn’t want to become an artist, having grown up in a household of bohemian lefty artists.” But Grossmann’s inner leanings won out. Moving to Vancouver in 1981, she was attracted to the new Emily Carr Institute on Granville Island, where “something drew me to apply.”

It was an exciting growth period. She describes it as an explosive time, full of energy and hope. “I found myself in a painting class with Attila (Richard Lukacs), Graham (Gillmore), Derek Root and Douglas Coupland. We segregated — or were segregated — by some of our teachers, who saw something in us.”

The five wound up sharing studio space together. They called themselves Futura Bold. Except for Coupland, whom Grossmann describes as “3D”, the group focused on a renewed interest in figurative painting. “There had been a huge shift away from figurative painting to conceptual art in the 1960s and ‘70s,” says Grossmann. “But we thought paint could be experimental. It was all about surfaces and texture and the alchemy of the paint. And what if we used photos in the mix or rubber or whatever?”

Futura Bold generated local attention and upon graduation in 1985, four of the group’s members (Gillmore, Grossmann, Lukacs and Root) were asked by the Vancouver Art Gallery to be part of what was to become a landmark show, The Young Romantics. The other four painters included Vicky Marshall, Philippe Raphanel, Charles Rea and Mina Totino.

The show’s curator was Scott Watson, now director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at UBC. “Painting had revived elsewhere about 10 years before it came to Vancouver,” Watson says, adding that the revival in Vancouver had its own signature, often large-scale works with heroic postures. “They were big paintings with lots of marks and they were lush with colour and texture.”

The “Young Romantics” term, which has stuck with the group, including Grossmann, was coined by Watson, but Watson says he now regrets the name. At the time he was thinking of Britain’s Romantic movement in the late 18th century through to the early 19th century. “I meant to refer to that, the sense of artistic discovery of ordinary life while at the same time embracing the exotic and the sublime. But the term romantic is so highly charged in today’s culture and has meanings that I never intended, like a lack of discipline, a dreaminess, even a silliness.”

Watson remembers Grossmann’s early work. “She used to paint on found surfaces like old doors and suitcases. Her work has followed a consistent development in that she continues to work with found images and often figuratively. She still uses paint as an expressive medium — it’s not just for colour. She uses it to produce an emotional response. Her work is often about memory and history. It’s an archive of lost humanity.”

In addition to her association with the high-profile Young Romantics show at the VAG, Grossmann was part of a group show in New York City at the 49th Parallel Gallery in 1985. All this activity launched Grossmann and the Futura Bold group internationally. “We got a springboard,” says Grossmann. “It took us right out of North America. Attila went to Berlin, I went to Paris, Derek to London and later New York, Graham went to New York and Doug went to Milan and later Japan.”

Grossmann moved back to Vancouver in 1997 to continue practicing her artwork, to teach at Emily Carr and at the University of British Columbia, and to raise her son. But she never lost touch with her old Futura Bold gang. “We were always aware of everybody all the time. We knew where we all were. As luck would have it, we all found ourselves back in Vancouver at the same time. Then we thought, ‘we’ve always been working for our dealers. Why not do whatever we want?’ And we decided we’d do a show that we curated ourselves in a non-art space.”

Called The Basement Show because it took place in vacant concrete rooms in a basement area of Vancouver’s Electra building (the old BC Hydro office tower with outside tile mosaics done in the 1950s by the renowned artist and teacher B.C. Binning), the highly successful show was held in 2003.

Grossmann plans to continue doing her solo work as well as working with her long-established group of art pals. “It’s a fantastic experience and you end up learning how the creative process occurs in five different individuals. We have different ways of working but where the magic happens is when all five say, ‘Yeah’.”

Paper Dolls runs June 1 to 24 at Diane Farris Gallery, Vancouver.
Beverly Cramp is a Vancouver-based freelance writer.