French street artist Miss. Tic dies aged 66

The influential French street artist Miss. Tic has died in Paris aged 66, her family has announced.

In a short statement her family said the artist, whose real name was Radhia Novat, passed away on Sunday after suffering from an unspecified illness.

Miss. Tic is seen as one of the pioneers of stencil art and her graffiti of enigmatic female figures became a common sight in Paris.

She was briefly arrested in 1997 on charges of defacing public property.

But her works came to be shown in galleries in France and abroad. She also collaborated with the fashion brands Kenzo and Louis Vuitton.

Tributes have been paid to the artist from across France.

Writing on Twitter, France's newly appointed Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak saluted Miss. Tic's "iconic, resolutely feminist" work, saying it "will continue to poetize our streets for a long time".

And street artist Christian Guemy, who goes by the alias C215, hailed "one of the founders of stencil art". The walls of the 13th arrondissement of Paris — where her images are a common sight — "will never be the same again", he wrote on Twitter.

Miss. Tic was born in the Montmartre district of Paris in 1956 to a Tunisian immigrant father and a mother from Normandy.

She studied applied arts and street theatre before moving to California.

"I had a background in street theatre, and I liked this idea of street art," she is quoted by AFP as saying in an interview in 2011.

"At first I thought, 'I'm going to write poems'. And then, 'we need images' with these poems. I started with self-portraits and then turned towards other women," she said.

Her family have announced that her funeral, the date of which has yet to be announced, will be open to the public.