The elder sisters of these apparitions don't fare much better. Their creator, best known to art mavens and ordinary Angelenos by her childlike signature (becca), posts them in some of the rougher parts of East L.A. and downtown, as well as the seediest bits of Hollywood and the glitziest stretches of the Sunset Strip. A seamstress in pearls works her sewing machine in the infamous Belmont Tunnel graffiti pit, a spray-paint-covered area known to every gangbanger in the city. A Donna Reed mother figure guards a boarded-up doorway with a bowl full of greenery. A sultry lady of the evening sits amid the graffiti tags, her green dress hiked to reveal scarred shins.

"Everyone knows who Becca is, don't they?" asks Mat Gleason, the L.A. publisher of the scabrous, influential bicoastal art mag Coagula. "I mean, if I was talking to somebody, and they said, 'Who's Becca?' I would think, 'This person doesn't know shit about art.'"

Indeed, Becca is a bona fide art star -- not in the New York, art-whore sense of the term, in which painters ape the glitterati they so vainly wish to become, but in the up from the street, crafting a legend through her own originality, persistence and sweat, sense of the term.

For nearly a decade, this 33-year-old artist with a graduate degree in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute has made a name for herself by mounting disturbing images of little girls and women in the oddest locales of cities nationwide. Rendered on plain brown butcher paper in Becca's shacklike studio in Los Feliz (L.A.'s laid-back version of the East Village), the artist's acrylic progeny populate the entire metropolis of Los Angeles (and make appearances in Richmond, Va.; Washington, New York and San Francisco). Yet their numbers fluctuate based on factors beyond the artist's control. Pasted to various surfaces, the paintings may survive no longer than a day or a week before they are painted over, tagged or ripped down by enterprising collectors looking for a bargain.

Becca was born in Brooklyn and raised in New York, Virginia and Berkeley by well-educated, "artsy" parents. (Her mother is an artist, her stepfather a former professor at the University of California at Berkeley who now heads an environmental think tank. Her biological father is a writer.) She says she started drawing and doing other art while just a kid. Later she matriculated with a BFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. It was in Richmond that it first occurred to her to pursue outdoor installations after seeing the work of another street artist she didn't particularly like.

"I decided to try it myself, and I liked it," Becca explains. "The first one I ever did was in Richmond. There's still one of my paintings up there, I think, on an old bridge on Canal Street. If it's there, it must be over 10 years old now. It's just two black stars. One says, 'Grandma nice.' And the other says, 'Girlfriend try kill me.'"

While at VCU and shortly afterward, Becca pasted images in Washington, New York and Richmond, but she says most of them are long gone. When she took up residence in San Francisco to study painting at SFAI, she continued her street installations, to the chagrin, she says, of teachers who derided her work as too graphic and illustrative.

("I don't know if there's anything left in San Francisco," she tells me. "Maybe one in the Tenderloin, but most of it got painted over.")

She stuck it out at the Art Institute "to get that piece of paper," she says of the MFA she proudly displays wherever she happens to be living. (In the past four or five years, she's moved at least a half-dozen times around L.A.) In addition to a degree, the laconic young artist also acquired a distaste for providing anything approaching analysis of her work. She says her college professors constantly pestered her to explain herself, something she's never been good at or liked to do.

Press her on why she's expended so much energy on outdoor installations that are fleeting and unprofitable -- at least in the short term -- and she offers a couple of explanations, one practical, the other aesthetic. On the practical side, working outside has allowed her to avoid the ass kissing endemic to the gallery scene. And she hasn't had to schlep her pieces around to prospective representatives. She's been able to get the attention of gallery owners by making her presence known to the streetwise and by occasionally capturing the imagination of the press.

As far as aesthetics are concerned, Becca craves the found canvas. In fact, what brought her to settle in Los Angeles in 1994, following the '92 riots and the Northridge earthquake, was all of the abandoned property ready and waiting for her work.

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