Thursday, October 1, 2026
Every month, the Long Beach Public Library hosts a new art show, featuring 30 to 40 paintings, many by artists who live on the barrier island.
Placing the artwork on the wall is no easy task, and it takes an eye for arrangement. For 50 years, that has been the task of a 5”2’ inch woman, Naomi Diracles, now 87, a life-long barrier island resident and an artist whose work has been at libraries and art shows across Long Island.
Diracles has now retired from her volunteer post as Gallery Coordinator at the library, but, she says, never from painting. In an interview on the library’s second-floor Monday, Diracles was asked why she had done the work for half a century?
“I did not get paid,” she said, in her energetic voice. “I did it because I enjoyed art. I found I have an eye for balance, color and size.”
Tara Lannen-Stanton, the library director, said the library’s board of trustees will honor Diracles at its meeting March 21 with a certificate of appreciation.
And, Kathleen Ramsey, president of the Long Beach Art League – whose board Diracles served on for several years – will hold a fun-raiser this summer and donate proceeds to Diracles’s favorite charity – an animal league of her choosing.
Diracles, who has worked in a variety of art mediums, prefers to work in collage these days. Some of her work was displayed during the interview Monday – three pieces whose theme was music.
“I work in series,” she said. “This time the series was music.”
The Art League considers Diracles’s winning of a Long Island Railroad mural contest in the 1980s among its “historic achievements.” Before the current LIRR station was built in Long Beach, the railroad sponsored a competition for the mural that best represented the Long Beach community. Diracle’s colorful winning mural portrayed the beach with the names of local organizations on umbrellas.
“It remained on the walls of the LIRR station for quite some time,” the Art League said in a statement.
Diracles, who moved to Long Beach with her husband, Manny, who is now deceased, in 1964, had her own studio in their home for decades. She has since moved to Island Park. She began painting, she said, when she was 12 years old and living with her parents in Manhattan. Her parents had given her an oil painting set. She has never stopped.
In Long Beach, her husband urged her to attend an art class with a neighbor at the Lindell elementary school. At first, she balked, but went anyway. After, she said. “I realized I didn’t know anything. I was working by instinct.”
But she was a quick learner and soon was giving art lessons of her own.
“She was tough when I took her classes,” said Ramsey. “But I learned a lot of things.”
Diracles studied art at the Art Students League in Manhattan, Nassau County Community College, Five Towns Music & Art an the School of American Artists in Manhasset.
Her work has been at libraries in Port Washington, Islip, Hewlett-Woodmere, Freeport and she has had group exhibits at the Shelter Rock Arts Gallery and the Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts in Roslyn.
If she has one regret, Diracles said, “It is that I can’t show nudes. I love nudes. It is the human body. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
