The American Movement in Art was ushered in by the New York Abstract Expressionists of the 1940’s and ’50’s: Arthur Dove, Jackson Pollock, William de Kooning, etc.

It was a movement with powerful reverberations that influenced young painters at home and abroad. It was an exciting time; a revolution in art that followed on the heels of the earlier European revolution when the Impressionists, Fauvists, Surrealists, and Cubists rocked the world. It was a time when rocking the art world was possible, and every young artist was hoping to do just that.

Jim Costello and a few of his classmates brought the revolution to Notre Dame. They were young artists trained in the classical disciplines, who began breaking the rules. They were aided by the new acrylic paints Liquitex was field-testing at selected art schools. Once the kinks were worked out of the tubes of Titanium white and they stopped exploding, many painters never returned to oils. The fast-drying paint could be worked in the quick gestures of subjective emotional expression, emphasizing the creative, spontaneous act of painting.

These gestures play vividly in Jim’s work, allowing the interchange between emotion and narrative that characterizes his paintings and lends them the haunting, lyrical quality that beckons the viewer again and again.

I never tire of the company of Jim’s art. I never fail to smile when I think of it. I never fail to see its echoes in the fields, mountains, and valleys of the Shenandoah.

Maggie Maloney