Alexandra Nechita

Toward the end of our first year, we examined the life's work of the "9-year-old Picasso," Alexandra Nechita. The moppet, as we called her because that's what she was, was possessed of a pair of beautiful gray eyes, a 30-year-old's poise and a compulsive-obsessive's mania for slopping paint to canvas. Well, we prefer to think of it as compulsive-obsession because the alternative explanation is that her parents had her chained up in a place that was half- studio, half-sweatshop: her Cubist lithographs, cranked out in dozens, sold for thousands to such art-world luminaries as Miss Idaho.

Nechita is 15 now, and she recently delivered a portfolio of three paintings to the Pierside Gallery in Huntington Beach. Apparently, she's no longer obsessed but is instead spending more time on typical adolescent pursuits. She is no longer represented by the slightly sinister International Art Publishers—a Costa Mesa outfit about whom we have nothing more substantive to say than "they seemed creepy, somehow." And they've since gone out of business.

According to Pierside, Nechita has no management and no publicist, but she delivers work periodically. She lives "locally," wherever that is.