She was a painter and photographer; imaginative; obsessive about process; and a friend of poets and other artists, Alan Ginsberg, Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner among them.

In 1958, she started work on what became her magnum opus: a monster mixed-media painting titled The Rose, which, secreted in her studio, she worked on continuously for seven years. By the time it was finished, the crusty painting was an 11-by-8-foot object that reached a depth of 11 inches in some areas and weighed some 3,000 pounds. It made her legendary. (The Rose was acquired by the Whiney Museum in the '90s, and its complex story was the subject of an entire book.)

Yet few people know the artist and less about her work>

A traveling exhibit at the Menil Collection in 1990 introduced DeFeo to Houston. It included one huge 12-foot-high painting, Doctor Jazz, dated the same year she started The Rose, but the focus was on her works on paper. That more intimate and immediate facet of her creativity is revisited in a current exhibit titled Where the Swan Flies at Moody Gallery.

The spotlight falls on 34 works from four series dated 1971 to 1989, the year she died. Each series has a recognizable object as its starting point.

An empty box of tissues is the departure point for Reflections of Africa. The handle of a coffee mug is the base of Loop (Where the Swan Flies); Eureka derives from the vacuum cleaner of that name; the object for Eternal Triangle is an artist's eraser.

But DeFeo manipulated the mundane objects, crushing, slicing and otherwise distorting them, then rendered the results as pure abstract studies of shape, tone and volume with paint, collage, photocopies, charcol and graphite, and as gelatin silver photographs.

In two 1989 works, both untitled graphite on paper from the Reflections of Africa series, the oval opening of a tissue box, its flat sides and a decorative chevron motif are disembodied geometries on the page. At the same time, the quality of the surface and desnsity of tones provides both solidity and illusory depth.

Central to Loop is a 73-by-40 in painting that gives the exhibit its title. Relatively simple technically - acrylic paint on masonite - it offers a fluid, gestural form in shades of gray with yellowish tint and a multi-tone black ground. The swooping brush strokes shape something like an inverted comma that rises and wraps around, blurry and dynamic as if taking flight.

DeFeo arrived here through a number of studies. One gem in the group is an untitled photocollage from 1975. DeFeo shaped the loop from fabric or paper she creased. folded, and twisted nautilus-like, photogrphed it, cut it out and mounted it against a dense velvety black ground that sets it in relief.

Other include a little drawing that shows the mug's 'ear,' broken off from the cup and standing on its ends very clearly; in several more, it's been disembodied further and so grows increasingly abstract. She dissects the ceramic object to arrive at mere marks on a surface and describes not the object so much as the space it occupies.

Then there are the photocopies and photo-collages of Eureka. DeFeo visually dismantled the household appliance and meticulously wedded its parts to other things, dissimulating the joints of disparate parts. She aimed the camera at a small section of the appliance, removing it from its context. Charcoal or graphite drawings reveal it as a shadowy, somewhat industrial shape.

The meticulous collages are surreal. In one (No. 28 on the gallery's list) she shot the vacuum's caster in such a way that it resembles a cow's head; in No. 27, she glued the cutout of that caster to a photo of a cow so it looks like the cow's head.

The works in Eternal Triangle series are different. The pliable eraser she used as model begins as a narrow, rectangular object. With shading in charcoal and graphite, DeFeo twisted and turned it into a shape resembling a fortune cookie.