by Bill Richardson

"Oh, God," says the artist Angela Grossmann, recoiling slightly at a painting held up for her inspection. She is taking a break from the business of hanging her new show and the last thing she wants to look at is yet another bloody picture. "Oh, God," she repeats, rather more optimistically, as she registers the necessity for social nicety. It is, after all, the owner of the piece who is soliciting her opinion; and obviously he has wrested the thing from his wall in the hope that she will tell him something affirming about its provenance, its deeper significance, its cabbalistic subtext. It is not unreasonable to think that she might have such insights since it is, after all, her own creation. "Oh, God," she says, as she readies herself to deliver a considered and concise and cheerful pronouncement. "The head's not bad, I guess. Shall we get some coffee?"

The proferred piece is dated 1989. It's of a solitary, rather androgynous figure, who bears a family resemblance, albeit several generations removed, to some of the paintings that comprise Grossmann's new solo exhibition, My Vocation. It has just opened at Vancouver's Diane Farris Gallery, where she has been showing since 1985. That was the same year she came into public prominence as one of the painters included in a landmark show at the Vancouver Art Gallery called Young Romantics; the same show that was, famously, a launching pad for Attila Richard Lukacs, Philippe Raphanel, Derek Root, and Vicky Marshall among others.

Those were the days when, as befits a young romantic, Grossmann painted on a grand scale, using whole walls or theatre flats or drop sheets to contain her exuberance. Latterly, the works have been scaled down, but then maturity has a way of making a virtue out of such a paring back. Grossmann was born in London, England, in 1955. A little math, which is a dangerous thing, will give away that she's no longer young, exactly, but she still cuts an indisputably romantic figure. What with her jet hair pulled into no-nonsense, work-a-day pigtails and her full red lips and her pale complexion and the easy way she wears her combat boots, she has an evident gift for the dramatic gesture. Intelligent and articulate, by turns introspective and hilarious, she has presence to burn.

Sitting over a coffee in a cafe with Viennese aspirations, and basking in the glow of a nearby sachertorte, she explains that the title of her new show, My Vocation, is borrowed from a short story by Natalia Ginsburg. "It's about her being a writer, not necessarily brilliant or a visionary, but passionate. Writing is what she can do better than anything else. That's exactly how I feel right now about my work. Left to my own devices, or left very much alone, this is what I do with a great deal of joy, and without very much consideration of consequence."

In the past, Angela Grossmann has often focused her artistic attentions on those marginalized by society. In a 1987 show called Affaires d'Enfants she painted 13 suitcases she salvaged from an alley in Paris, and which had apparently been discarded by a state agency that sponsored camp holidays for orphans. In 1996, she based her Big House series on old mugshots taken of prisoners in the B.C. Penitentiary. "All those sad, sad faces! No wonder nobody bought any of them," she says with a self-deprecating, rueful shrug.

The paintings now on exhibition at the Farris Gallery, although they are of solitary figures and are certainly expressive of ruminative moods, are rather more cheerful overall, as befits a vocational celebration. And as she did with mugshots and suitcases and theatre flats, Grossmann continues to incorporate found objects into her work.

A number of the My Vocation paintings are made on collaged surfaces. On prominent display in the window of the gallery is Remnants, a gorgeous, mysterious rendering of a woman who sits and stares into the middle distance. She emerges, on closer inspection, from a tightly woven amalgam of flea market and junk store finds: a Turkish luggage tag addressed to Huguette Gagnon in Blaine, Washington; a postcard addressed in a calligraphic hand to Mlle. Marie Henry, Rue Mozart 121, Paris; an envelope bearing Argentinian stamps addressed to the Estudios de Conversacion in Chicago. Scrutinize some of the other paintings and you might find labels from jigsaw puzzles, postcards with four-cent Canadian stamps from the Children's Aid Society in Barrie, Ontario, a piece of business correspondence from La Societe Generale des Sucreries & de la Raffinerie d'Egypte in Cairo, and any number of letters from any number of long-dead correspondents.

"I've collected things for years and years, and for different reasons," says Grossmann. "Because I love the way it was printed, or because of the handwriting, or because of the colour. I gathered things up and put them in suitcases and dragged them around from continent to continent never quite knowing what I would do with them, but always thinking it was important to have them. I use them to protect them, in a way; to protect my idea of beauty. The stamps. The handwriting. It's not nostalgia, it's just a matter of saying this was an art form, a beautiful thing. I've got nothing of my own family, so in a way that gives me the freedom to use everyone else's past very liberally." Because we have devoted the past 50 years to wrestling with the seemingly impossible certainty that six million Jews were murdered while the world looked on; and because we remain appallingly complacent to the genocides that are being perpetrated as the century ends, no one could look at Grossmann's melancholy subjects, or consider her fascination with the dross of the lost, without taking the Holocaust into account. The way she renders, say, the faces of prisoners in the B.C. pen is achingly reminiscent of the images of the inmates of Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz.

Her inclination has been to resist this self-evident reference for fear of lapsing into cliche, or simple sympathy-mongering. "People have always said, whether I was painting prisoners or angels, that there was a suggestion of the Holocaust. And I suppose I do have to wonder why I'm attracted to old letters, old suitcases, old clothes, displacement, nostalgia, things that have gone that can't be replaced, to handwriting. It's all about disappearance and I'm so bent on it because of my history. My father is a German Jew. His whole family was lost. It's not something I deal with directly, but I can't possibly deny that it's part of who I am. Of course, it comes out in the work." Part of Grossmann's fascination with discarded remnants of individual lives, and her sympathy for, or perhaps fascination with, the displaced, comes from her own hankering after a place that can accommodate that one weighty syllable, "home." She has lived in London, Toronto, Paris, Amsterdam, and Montreal. She has been back in Vancouver for the past several years, and is raising her son here. But this is not the city where gravity exerts on her its strongest tug. She is restless. She plots her future travels. One suspects she won't be here for long. For now, it will do. For now, there is the solace of painting. "When I unlock my studio door, I get such a feeling of pleasure. I don't listen to music. I have no radio. There's just me and what I do. It becomes a metaphor for building a nest, for having some sense of who and where I am. Over time, my work has become my history."

To value what's been lost. To salvage what you find. To fold it into your own story. To render it beautiful in the present moment. What could be more affirmative of the dwindling past or the creeping future? In the here and now, it is a splendid vocation.

My Vocation opens today and runs until the Mar. 31 at the Diane Farris Gallery