Scary cherubs and bloody wall flowers

Artist Becca Midwood, painter of haunting outdoor portraits, is getting a reputation as the "female Basquiat."
by Stephen Lemons
Originally published in Salon, May 22, 2001.

Becca Midwood's little girls haunt the City of Angels like some ragged army of the undead. Cherubs in blue nighties clutch cloth dolls and nap in alleyways or on abandoned buildings. Sweet bloody colleens with gaping bullet holes in their temples stand politely on construction-site snipe walls. Fetching nymphets with gore dripping down their thighs play on busy bridges and overpasses. And redheaded maidens, carrying lit firecrackers in their dainty fingers, keep the homeless company on skid row.

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.
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