Gallery owner and curator, Diane Pearl, is one of Lakeside’s best-known and much-loved community members.

Popularized mostly for her fabulous gallery of Mexican artisanal crafts representing more than 65 artists over 22 years (and her generous charitable endeavors), it may not be as well-known that Diane is an artist in her own right. That is about to change with the opening of her first solo show on Friday, March 7 at Casa del Sol in Ajijic.

The exhibition, entitled “Pearl’s Pearls,” consists of a series of 30 highly detailed and fanciful framed pen and ink line drawings, each of which took over 80 hours to complete. The inspiration for the series is an homage to Diane’s father who, in his late 90s, was nearing the end of his life. For her to cope with the emotional stress and impending loss facing her, over four years Diane turned to her first love, art, as a means to rid her mind of day-to-day problems and submerge herself in the paper before her. Working in an almost meditative state, focusing on repetition and contrast, the artist embodied in her work the reverence she felt towards her father, who supported and encouraged her artistic career.

Basing some of her designs on earlier adult coloring books that she created, Diane began working in grayscale, first outlining images that call to mind natural forms, such as sea shells, waves, flowers, as well as stark geometric and animal images. The shapes are not exactly representational, but rather stylized and fanciful, only hinting at known images. Within the outlines, the artist worked in meticulous detail to fill in the spaces with tiny crosshatching, miniature geometrical shapes and other repetitive forms that give the final work a depth and sometimes a three-dimensional quality because of the tonal range of white to black and everything in between.

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