PROFILE : Unmasking Art : Isabel Diamond’s work mixes her Latino heritage with expressions of many cultures.

First, the moral of the story: Never take a mask at face value.

A procession of masks used to drive Isabel Camacho Diamond to hide from the annual Lent festivals in the Costa Rican village where she grew up.

But now another crowd of masks has delivered Diamond and several of her recent works to the galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“To me,” Diamond said, “a mask is a way of transforming one’s self. We use them every day. . . . I think if we took our masks off, we wouldn’t recognize ourselves.”

Diamond, 56, has been an artist for more than 30 years, the last two in Ventura.

And her work is beginning to win attention in galleries and museums.

On June 7, the Los Angeles Southwest College Campus Art Gallery concluded a dual exhibition that paired Diamond’s works with pieces from Joe Bastida Rodriguez.

And on Aug. 3, five pieces of Diamond’s work will go on display in the rental and sales gallery of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, along with pieces from seven other Latino or black artists from Southern California.

The exhibit, “L.A. Expressions: The Cultural Shift,” was organized by the museum’s Community Resource Advisory Committee, and will run through Aug. 31.

“Someone told me about her work. So I called her and asked to see some slides,” said Cecil Fergerson, curator of the exhibit. “But she loaded all these paintings into a van, drove down, and brought them into my studio. I took one look at them, and I was very impressed.”

In particular, Fergerson liked the way Diamond uses bold colors and geometric shapes, uniting the influences of various cultures with her Latino heritage.

“The thing I love about Isabel,” Fergerson said, “is she works all the time . If she walks out in her garden and sees a rock that looks like a head, she’ll put some eyes in it.”

Which helps explain Diamond’s hillside Ventura home, where masks, paintings and sculptures lie on the lawn, dangle in the patio and stand like sentries at the staircase.

“As you see,” said the artist, mid-stride, “I can’t keep still.”

Diamond was born in Costa Rica, where each year on the Sunday before Lent, the faithful would climb into elaborate masks and costumes.

At 14, she moved with her father to New Orleans, the home of Mardi Gras and all manner of spooky disguises. Then came New York, and long and various succession of exotic residences and trips--Iran, Spain, Lebanon, France, Haiti. In Pakistan, Diamond took up art and found herself reworking the powerful iconography that results when Catholic ceremony mingles with folk culture.

She moved to Ventura in 1988 with civil engineer Dale Diamond, her husband of 11 years.

One piece she will show at the L.A. County exhibit includes a bearded man, his face cast in clay, broken and reassembled. The face was mournful to begin with. Now a fissure runs down it beneath his right eye, suggesting the path of a tear or the line of a passing shadow.

“I was testing myself,” said Diamond, standing beneath the face. “It’s OK to make something beautiful. But are you good enough to break it and pull something stronger from it?”

Maureen Davidson, executive director of the Ventura Arts Council, met Diamond in 1988, as Davidson was putting together the council’s Momentum Gallery on Palm Street.

Davidson’s gallery walls were bare, but Diamond came in anyway and, Davidson recalls, “kind of demanded to know what the heck we were doing.”

Davidson wanted the first exhibit to be untraditional and strong.

She saw Diamond’s work, and plans were hatched for the show that opened the Momentum Gallery in May, 1988.

Two years later, Davidson said, Diamond’s remains the most emotionally provocative show the gallery has hung.

“The comment that I always remember came from this one irate person,” said Davidson. “He said, ‘This is the religion of the ugly.’ ”

“My work is religious,” Diamond said. “And it deals also with relationships and communication, or the lack of it. As you know, human beings aren’t very good at communicating . . . not to other countries, and not to other people.”

Diamond has all manner of plans for communication. When she first moved to this area two years ago, she was appalled by the litter on beaches. She started gathering it into waterfront installations, complete with anti-litter messages.

Last year, Diamond turned her attention to drug abuse and produced a cautionary canvas that shows a gray-fleshed, drug-sick mother struggling to keep hold of her child. Diamond is looking for a public agency interested in displaying the work.

And recently, Diamond started a large semi-abstract painting with an environmental theme, beginning with a tangle of black strokes suggestive of an oil spill.

But as they did with the bearded man’s mask, her instincts are threatening to overthrow her original plans.

Diamond hangs the paint-spattered, 10-foot-high canvas in her living room and surveys it from a healthy distance.

Black foreground, peach strokes, a smear of red and purple that might be a tropical fish . . .

“See that old man in there?” Diamond asked suddenly. “There’s an old, old man in there, saying he wants to come out. So now I look at it, and it dictates to me what I must do to it.”

UP CLOSE: ISABEL CAMACHO DIAMOND

Vocation: Artist.

Location: Ventura.

Birthplace: Costa Rica.

Recent Achievement: Included in an upcoming exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Reference: Cecil Fergerson, free-lance curator, who says: “The thing I love about Isabel is she works all the time . If she walks out in her garden and sees a rock that looks like a head, she’ll put some eyes on it.”

Influences: Roman Catholic ritual, Mardi Gras, German Expressionism.

Confession: “I can’t keep still.”