Angels in L.A.

If anyone could turn an 80-pound piece of fiberglass into an angelic work of art, it would be Alexandra Nechita.

“I just treated it as a canvas,” said Alexandra as she stood Thursday in California Plaza downtown, waiting for Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and the grand unveiling of her 6-foot, 4-inch fiberglass angel.

Alexandra, who is 15, has been painting since she was 6 and exhibiting her work since she was 8. She is talented enough--and rich enough--to have a personal manager and gallery representatives around the world.

An abstract painter with hundreds of works and earnings that exceeded $1 million by the time she was 10, Alexandra seems never to have suffered artist’s block. She is always painting something.

“I can have 10 or 15 canvases going at one time,” said Alexandra, who immigrated here from Romania when she was 2 and lives in Whittier with her parents and brother.

On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays she attends Lutheran High School in Orange. Fridays are often for traveling to gallery openings. Thursdays, she gets some tutoring and paints.

On this particular Thursday, she was pressed into service to kick off a public art project called A Community of Angels.

With corporate and community funding, 400 angel sculptures will be decorated and painted according to the whims of 400 artists. Then, overnight, in February, the angels will descend on city and county sidewalks, parks and plazas where they will remain until May, when they will be auctioned off to benefit Volunteers of America and Catholic Big Brothers.

The project is a joint venture of those two charities, the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the mayor’s Volunteer Bureau. It mimics a public art installation of cows done in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1998, which was followed by the popular “Cows on Parade” in Chicago. A similar cow installation sprang up in New York, invoking the scorn of one New York art critic, who called it a cross between “a happening and an art class at summer camp.”

The animal public art parade caught on. There have been lizards in Orlando and horses in Lexington, Ky. “Buffalo, I think, is doing buffalo,” said Julie Grieve, a publicist. “It’s definitely a national trend.”

Los Angeles, predictably, chose angels. Designed by artist Tony Sheets, these fiberglass seraphim are being produced by a factory at $1,500 each, according to Grieve. Corporations can sponsor an angel for $3,500; nonprofit groups get them at cost.

Artists--who will be paid a $1,000 honorarium--must submit their ideas to a design committee, which will pass some preliminary judgment, then collect all the designs in a portfolio and forward them to the buyers. Corporations can use the angels to evoke some of their corporate identities, but “nothing too logo-y,” said Grieve.

Alexandra was invited to paint one of the first two angels and is the project’s spokeswoman.

“We do a lot of charity events,” Alexandra said, referring to herself and her parents. Dressed in a leather coat and fashionable platform shoes (“I got them in St. Tropez,” she said, pronouncing the name with a perfect French accent), she looked like a sophisticated 22-year-old.

“It’s very difficult to be level-headed in this business--art, entertainment,” said Alexandra. “You have to remember where you came from.”

She was joined at the unveiling by artist Miguel Angel Reyes. He was painting his angel in California Plaza as sponsors, officials and guests waited for the kick-off ceremony to begin.

Reyes, who lives in the Fairfax district, will be working on his angel Monday and Tuesday in the plaza in downtown Los Angeles. He’s used to being watched. “I used to do portraits of people in nightclubs,” said Reyes. On his angel, he was painting a portrait of a friend named Alisa. “I can’t spell her last name.”

The angels come in three postures: standing, sitting and flying. Apparently, the flying ones can be suspended for display. They have featureless faces, undefined bodies and huge wings.

“To me, angels are very, very special,” Alexandra said to the assembled group including Mayor Riordan, who referred jokingly to her as “La Femme Nikita.”

“They symbolize a shield, a protection against evil,” Alexandra said at the unveiling. She left the face unpainted, she said, because “you can’t identify angels, you can’t label them.”

Later, it was suggested to her that her angel looked a bit like Joan of Arc.

Alexandra pursed her lips and considered the comment silently. “See, that’s what I love about it,” she finally said, diplomatically. “Hearing other people’s interpretations.”