Lola had a very understanding mother. When she discovered Lola using makeup to paint on the walls of their home, instead of punishing her, she decided to buy her young daughter some real art supplies. Soon Lola was using art as a means to communicate. When she was just 8 her father sold her first work of art - a painting of a bird.

Born in Belize City in 1959, Lola opened her 1st gallery in 1992, in the remote Garifuna Village of Seine Bight on the beautiful Placencia peninsula in southern Belize.

Lola paints in acrylics on fine canvas, and when she can't get that she’ll use boat sail canvas. She also likes using the shells of gourds (also known here in Belize as calabash) and driftwood. Lola paints scenes of everyday Belizean life, especially the women and children of her village, in her very unique faceless style. She's also inspired by the surrounding sea, lagoon and jungle around her.

In her studio, she will sit, paint and converse with you about the history and culture of the Garifuna and Creole people of Belize. Garifuna people are descendants from african slaves who were shipwrecked off the coast of St. Vincent in the Antilles, swam ashore and eventually intermarried with the Carib Indians, becoming the Black Caribs. They were deported to the Bay Islands in Honduras by the British after they sided with the French in a war and so eventually spread to Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua. 

Creoles are the result of the mix between white slave masters and black slaves in Belize. That’s why many have green, gray or blue eyes and dark skin and curly hair.

The paintings have both Creole and Garifuna women together, usually the ones showing their bellybutton are the Creoles, as this was a traditional dress style with Creole women of long ago, while the Garifuna women tended to cover more of their bodies.

Her paintings hang all over the world from Taiwan, to Norway, to New York - the entrance of an art gallery in SoHo has a piece by her to welcome visitors called "Frida Kahlo on my wall, Orchids on my table" This features a portrait of Frida Kahlo one of Lola's inspirations.

Lola is also a writer and illustrator and has several publications - Belizean Kat Tailz, a children's book; In My Village, a book of poems; Stingray Burger, a book of short stories, and her new 2009 publication Folklore From Belize.

ALL IMAGES ARE COPYRIGHTED BY LOLA DELGADO, 2009