The Vancouver Sun
Saturday June 17, 2006

By Clint Burnham

Angela Grossmann makes big pictures — in this case, in her glorious new exhibition now up at Diane Farris Gallery, pictures of girls. Paper Dolls are works on paper, some life- (or Amazon-) sized, and others smaller. Working from Victorian-era photographs of girls, Grossmann has made art that shows us who girls were, and are.

When you look at Grossmann’s paintings, at, say, Pearls (2006) when you enter the gallery, you probably have to look up. The painting (it’s actually a collage, or mixed-media on paper) is that big: over seven feet high. You may see the pearls of the title on the girl on the right (there are two girls in the picture). And you will see the girls’ faces, which both stand out and do not stand out from the rest of the work.

Grossmann has taken small portraits of girls in the 19th century and blown them up, but that is not the only reason the faces rest uneasily in the paintings. For she frames the faces very carefully — which is not to say neatly — in a swirling mess of hair and dark paint. The girls themselves hold a steady gaze, and their upper bodies are fairly discernable: pearls, bodices, arms folded or crossed.

But as your eye moves down the painting, things start changing. The brush strokes become more vigorous, more deliberate, less representational. The girls’ legs almost disappear in the surface of the paper, to be replaced or finished with drips that continue to the very bottom of the paper, collecting there in a horizontal line, as if unwilling to leave the scene.

So there are a couple of things going on in Grossmann’s paintings in this show. First of all, there is a tension between the use of found, or appropriated, images of the girls, and Grossmann’s rendering of their surroundings, of their bodies and clothing. Then, there is a tension between the working up that she does around the girls’ heads, as a concentration or vortex of activity, and the verticality with which the paintings move down the surface of the paper. And finally, there is a wonderful messiness on the paper itself, as a record of Grossmann’s materials and process: drips, splatters, and smears lend the art a cheerful insouciance.

In other paintings by Grossmann in Paper Dolls, such as Blue Girl (2005), layers of collage are evident on the surface. Here the girl’s face is slightly cocked, her eyes defiant, her arms crossed, and her body lightly draped in fabric conveyed through lines akin to a fashion designer’s sketches or the New York painter David Salle’s outlines. In the companion painting, Blue Girls, the surface around the girls’ heads is crackled, as a record of Grossmann’s concentrated and fervent activity with the brush and other implements. In contrast, the bottom half of these girls is rendered with broad brush strokes, in which one can see the physicality of the artist’s effort.

Speaking with The Sun in her Gastown studio, Grossmann acknowledged the distinction in the painting between what she does with the girls’ heads and how she paints their bodies.

“The heads are the real persons, I don’t make that up,” she declared, “that’s where history is,” referring to her use of vintage photographs. And when her imagination does take over, on the rest of the surface, there we see the drips, the splotches, the smears of her process. Grossmann noted that she doesn’t set out for that effect, “but I don’t care what it looks like. I mean I do care, and that’s me trying really hard. But when the painting is in the studio, it’s not a commodity; I don’t want the considerations of the marketplace to enter into the studio.”

The messiness of Grossmann’s paintings may well deter some viewers and attract others. For these stains are a record of her working at her art, and part of the vocabulary of painting since the mid-twentieth century. Grossmann’s own history allows her to partake of that tradition. Born in the U.K., she arrived in Vancouver in the late 1970s and attended Emily Carr, where her colleagues were Derek Root, Graham Gillmore, Attila Richard Lukacs, Mina Totino, and Charles Rea. This group then showed as the Young Romantics at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1985, re-establishing painting as a medium worthy of consideration after 20 years of conceptualism and minimalism.

In Grossmann’s paintings, then, the process of making the work is as relevant as any meaning that might attach itself to the images themselves. Thus La Senza Girl and La Senza Girl II are in part motivated by the marketing of sexually explicit clothing at so-called “tweens,” or girls between the ages of nine and 13. But the paintings themselves resist any easy or moralistic outrage at what the kids are wearing today. La Senza Girl (2006), for example, shows a girl in pigtails wearing a revealing bustier. Her stomach is exposed, and one leg may be naked as well. But the juxtaposition of vintage photograph and tarty get-up is what gives the picture its real dynamism.

As in most of the photographs that Grossmann uses, the girl’s eyes in La Senza Girl possess a seriousness that is hard to find in contemporary pictures. It is a seriousness that was only possible in a world before photography became ubiquitous, a seriousness borne of a time when having your picture taken was a serious, if not ceremonial, occasion. Grossmann weds that seriousness, that long-gone past, to a present day that, like her half-determined, half-messy paintings, resists easy definition. For in the end, these are paintings that ask us to do something. They ask us to think about what we expect pictures to look like.

Clint Burnham is a Vancouver educator and freelance writer.