Twelve intrepid artists responded to Torrie Groening's bold invitation to participate in her printmaking project entitled HEARTFELT and addressing the theme of 'love, true love' - "intrepid" and "bold" because neither our present social or artistic climate is accommodating to notions involving deep feeling; romantic love is an idea that belongs to the past. Romanticism is something we read about in history books while the 'love-in' of the 60's has been replaced by the 'hate-in' of the 90's (at a recent concert in Vancouver, the largely teenage audience was instructed to chant "we hate love, we love hate"). Torrie herself though conspicuously youthful, does not share the prevalent cynicism. Her motivation for the project was simple. "I wanted to do something positive and optimistic"; she says and, considering that the subject is so broad and variable - was it to be parental love, spiritual love, brotherly love - love as sexual desire, devotion, caring, any of all of them - she determined to leave the subject wide open for the artists to approach the theme as they chose, her only instruction to them being a gentle suggestion that they put aside their cynicism for the occasion.

How would twelve youthful artists, with Torrie herself making a thirteenth, all nurtured in a television culture where love is mostly presented as little more than thoughtless sexual gratification tackle the subject? In thirteen strikingly individual ways as it turns out though certain recurrent attitudes might be observed. Has Groening's admonishment concerning cynicism been respected? Love as feeling or sentiment does not appear to have been a pre-occupation for any of them. Surely not for Vikky Alexander, whose flippant response ENDLESS SUMMER is a computer disk listing of titles of old movies printed on a flat green ground, and involving a notion of dreamy adolescent summers spent in movie houses watching romantic films - but she doesn't get involved. She is not alone in looking to past times and places to find models of romantic expression. With tongue in cheek David Ostrem chooses the brassy cover of a fifty's pin-up girl magazine FLIRT which promises "Hints for bashful bachelors" on p.26 inside. Angela Grossmann's photographic print FASCINATION NO. 4 portrays a Marlene Dietrich like vamp, while tiny figures of soldiers (perhaps prisoners of war?) captured in small smudged and murky snapshots, silently witness her provocative presence from the side lines. In her photographic print Body/love/Soul, Deborah Koenker goes further into the past for her references. An empty, marble-clad room reminiscent of parts of the British Museum, hosing classical Greco-Roman antiquities, marble busts on pedestals around the walls and prominently displayed in the centre an architectural fragment in which is imprisoned the figure of a male slave(?). On either side stand large marble urns on which the artists has placed the image of a butterfly and cupid and the inscriptions 'Psyche' and 'Cupid' respectively. Soft dusty light fills the enclosed palpable space inviting the imagination to travel into an enigmatic and distant past. Ed Pien's BENEATH THE CHERRY BLOSSOMS has two profiled heads, depicted in sinuous outlining contour and inter-locked in oscillation; an overlay of translucent pink paper gives a clue. Pien is remembering his growing up in China where it was the custom of amorous couples to stroll beneath the blossoming trees.

Nothing is enigmatic or distanced about Joe Average's SELF PORTRAIT, with it's 'in your face' strident comic-book drawing and primary colors, or Carel Moiseiwitsch's powerful drawing of a wave as it peaks. An ardent surfer her message of rapturous passion using the breaking wave as metaphor is clear and strong and her title YOU ARE MY STORM IN A PORT AND MY PORT IN A STORM reiterates her ready engagement with the theme. In SPIRIT IMPLODING, Jack Shadbolt re-affirms his life-long belief in the capacity of visual form to speak its own language and carry its own message. Essentially an abstract print whose knots and bursts and thrusts and spinnings and skeletal structures hint at a realm of leaf mold or sprouting seed and opening flowers where life continues its endless cycle of energy and regeneration. Only two artists go straight for the biology. Eric Metcalfe in his witty and sophisticated SPERM ALPHABET. Of course he was aware of the visual pun, how strongly the animated white shapes arrayed of a humid green ground evoked his personal long-time pre-occupation with the saxophone? The other, Doug Biden who lays out an assortment of erotic body parts - a breast, a penis, mouth, hand, an apple and a section of spinal vertebrae - like choices offered on a television menu.

Brian Musson's elegant and spare print is highly personal and very secretive. The individual forms are readily identified; the beautifully drawn orchid, the silhouetted de Haviland Venom, a cupid, and a mutilated hand (a reference to the practice known among love-lorn courtiers in chivalric medieval cultures of sending the severed for-finger as a love token to the object of their devotion). We can identify these talismans individually but they conjoin in meaning only in the experience, the mind and the heart of the artist, - just as the constellation is usually held together by the small black heart in the centre. MON COEUR EST AU CHOMAGE is probably the most heartfelt piece in the folio. There is a clarity and generosity about Groening's approach to her own theme LOVE WITHOUT MODESTY - A GIFT OF COURAGE in the transparency of the swelling glass bottle and the water it contains the luminous shadows whose quiver of life is echoed in the promise of the unfolding daffodil blossoms within the bottle. The female vessel symbol, here as bottle and cowrie shell are ample containers against whose generosity the pencil of decision (red on one end, green on the other) imposes its easy restraint.

Ross Penhall's INVITATION is alone in its romantic approach to the topic. The urge to follow the curving road to and through the narrow opening in a dense wall of green is irresistible and highly romantic, for what lies beyond is not only unknown, it is mysterious and perhaps deliciously risky; a dreamlike airless and claustrophobic world of dark and dense swollen bulbous forms where one might smother in pneumatic bliss. Nonetheless as in love the invitation must be accepted and the risk taken.

In producing this fresh and lively folio, Ms. Groening has indeed done something 'positive and optimistic'. It is to be hoped that she has similar urges in the future.

Doris Shadbolt, February 5, 1997