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If you climb the hill above Georganne Deen’s rented bungalow to just the right spot, on a day that isn’t too jaundiced with smog, and sight along one of the narrow side yards between the little stucco houses and garages, you can catch a glimpse of HOLLYWOOD.

HOLLYWOOD, all caps, in white block letters, is a sign, not a place. It is an unspecific symbol—abstract, unadulterated, universal. There are other Hollywoods, more heavily laden symbols: Hollywood the cutthroat industry, Hollywood the sequined illusion, even Hollywood the city of nasty streets you wouldn’t walk alone, of mansions-to-die-for perched in the hills.

Georganne Deen’s Hollywood is at once more personal and more generic. The special effects in her pictures aside, her Hollywood may not be in California. More likely, it’s in some lover-forsaken corner of some other city somewhere. Perhaps it’s in Fort Worth, where the mother who confessed she’d “climb a flight of stairs to tell a lie” still lives.

Deen’s Hollywood is populated almost exclusively by women (“the men don’t matter at all,” she says). It is the place where bulimia got its start, and battered wives force themselves to live, and bad-hair days are the norm—where the self-abuse of trying to live a fantasy as a real girl-woman catches up. Deen’s art is one of rejection, in a style purloined from men (her brothers’ hot-rod books introduced her to Big Daddy Roth and Robert Williams early on). Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogues continue to be a major influence.

A dropout from some good schools—East Texas State in 1974, CalArts in 1980—Deen today enjoys notoriety as an underground comix artist and magazine illustrator. The attention paid her by the fine arts establishment has been halting, however, consisting of regular inclusion in solo and group exhibitions at alternative galleries, but arm’s-length treatment by collectors and critics. It is hard to know where to cubbyhole an angry cartoonist and her impassioned spewings. Deen is far from an “Outsider” artist (“I wish,” she says. “Maybe when I’m institutionalized.”) But she nevertheless shares with those naive visual geniuses a propensity for tactless truth and untamed ingenuity. She also shares their tendency toward autobiography. “All of the women,” she confides, “are me.”

Yet the image she offers of a woman’s self-inflicted harm—damage in response to unsatisfiable cultural expectations—is a bit like the glimpse of the Hollywood sign one gets from her neighborhood. Not abstract, of course, and certainly not unadulterated, but all too universal.