Experiences of a Girl as Seen by a Woman : Art: Georganne Deen, one of five females exhibiting in ‘Kustom Kulture,’ taps into pop culture and childhood memories.

Like many little girls, artist Georganne Deen’s favorite toy was Barbie.

Her Barbie, however, barely resembled today’s wholesome blonde with the Malibu address. The ‘50s version, Deen recalled Thursday, was a dark-haired “dominatrix” in a skin-tight animal-skin sheath and heavy makeup.

“She was a good match for Rat Fink,” Deen deadpanned, eliciting belly laughs from those assembled at the Laguna Art Museum to hear her talk about “Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, Robert Williams and Others,” an exhibit that continues through Nov. 7.

Deen is one of five women in the 43-person show that delves into such areas of ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s popular culture as customized cars and hot rods, trashy underground comics and raunchy toys and T-shirt characters such as Rat Fink, Roth’s drooling, fly-attracting Titan of bad taste.

Deen, 42, a California Institute of the Arts graduate who lives in Los Angeles, met Williams in L.A. in the early ‘80s. Kindred spirits, they exhibited together and with Roth in several shows, mostly at alternative galleries or institutions in the city.

Deen curated one such exhibit in 1987 at the Otis School of Art and Design. It was something of a predecessor to “Kustom Kulture,” built on the premise that its car-fixated artists had a significant influence on the Southern California fine art scene.

Deen grew up in Fort Worth, where her parents treated sex and bodily functions as strictly taboo, fueling their children’s obsession with “puerile interests,” she recalled Thursday.

“We were so obsessed,” she said, “that my (five) brothers and I started drawing dirty pictures all the time,” until she was caught doing it at school and expelled.

Years later, she continued, “it all came flooding back out” when she met Roth and Williams, whose paintings are packed with violence and gratuitous sex and strange anthropomorphic creatures similar to those lurking in her own work.

The similarities are unmistakable in at least one of her paintings, in which a man-creature lusts after a nude woman with the same bugged-out eyes that Roth and Williams favor.

And of course, Deen--who used bright nail enamel to coat the model cars she built as a kid--depicts cars in her work.

One pivotal day when she was 12, a man parking his red car called her over and exposed himself. “It was horrible then,” she told the Laguna audience, “but I think it’s funny now, and whenever I painted a red car after that, it had a pervert in it.”

Advertising has been another major influence, Deen said, and in one pervert-in-a-car painting, she placed a lecherous Mr. Peanut at the wheel beside a buxom blonde. The monacled Planters Peanuts mascot always seemed to be making extravagant promises he wouldn’t keep, she explained.

In the late ‘80s, Deen plummeted into an “extremely debilitating” depression and began to try to paint about what was troubling her--namely her mother, with whom she hasn’t spoken in three years, and her childhood, when “our house burned down three times, my mom was drinking all the time and my dad left.”

Works from this period include grim, surreal images of her mother as a beer-drinking donkey and herself as a wailing, bloodied baby hanging upside down, or as an adult holding her head as if suffering from a relentless migraine.

The last painting in this series depicts her mother as a menacing spider--twice the size of their home--and herself as a tormented adolescent in the grips of puberty, standing stiff and naked.

“This was the age I really started hating myself,” she said, and, rushing to brighten the mood, she concluded her lecture with a slide of what appeared to be a rubber cockroach wearing a tiny crown and a cape.

“It is,” she said, “a nice little toy on a motorcycle.”

* “Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, Robert Williams and Others” continues through Nov. 7 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission: $1.50-$3) and its satellite at South Coast Plaza, 3333 Bristol St., Costa Mesa (11 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday through Friday; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday; 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday. Admission free).