Olga Costa - Artistry

Artistry

Although she took some classes in painting and engraving at the Academy of San Carlos, she was there only for three months in 1933. Her development came on her own as a hobby starting in 1936, with José Chávez Morado’s encouragement. For this reason, she is considered to be mostly self taught.

During her lifetime, she painted costumbrista subjects, still lifes, portraits and landscapes which are noted for their use of color. She has been classed as a “colorista along with artists such as Rufino Tamayo and Pedro Coronel. While her techniques were not always solid, the innocent quality of her work has been judged as moving. One recurring element in her work is the desire to create one key piece with the rest impeding its dominance as much as possible. Landscapes tend to repeat, not as main elements but rather as background from which to interpret the main idea. She was not interested in a faithful reproduction of images but rather an impression of what she saw. This often led to distortion in the images and experiments in the use of color. She had a preference for painting the female form, especially indigenous women and children in her earlier work. Her portrait work was dedicated mostly to women, with two notable early exceptions of her husband.

She began painting at a time when Mexico was nationalistic as well as anti-capitalistic and anti-imperialistic, reinforced by the Mexican muralism movement. While focused on Mexico, her work was not political. Her first works were formal and rigid focusing on Mexican folklore with bright colors and marked by influence from Diego Rivera, along with geometric forms from Carlos Mérida and the use of fruit from Rufino Tamayo, classified as costumbrista, but also contain Expressionist type elements in the style of María Izquierdo. Her early work is considered to be fragile and insecure due to her lack of formal training and much of the costrumbrista element was purposely integrated with an eye to selling the work in the United States. Her paintings often contain one or more elements larger than proportion to the rest of the composition such as the chair in La Novia from 1941, on which sits a bride. Her early models, especially in the 1930s where local people.

In the mid 1940s her techniques began to change especially her handling of materials and use of color, breaking away a bit from Mexican muralism. In the 1950s, her work evolved with richer and more varied use of color, especially deep greens, blues, oranges, reds and pinks which contrasted with the silent and somber depictions of Mexico’s indigenous. The compositions are formal and academic and show strong influence from Rivera. She still worked with costumbrista subjects but she was also beginning to move into nudes, still lifes and landscapes. Her best known work is from this time, La vendedora de frutas from in1951. Most of her landscape paintings date from the 1950s on which also included still lifes and images related to Day of the Dead altars. By the 1960s, she had moved into paler colors such as pinks, grays, beiges and greens not contrasting strongly and more influence from Expressionism.

Her later work is marked by abstraction and the painting of landscapes of the Bajío region, with red and deep green tones. These show changing color compositions with strong influence from Rufino Tamayo with emphasis on yellows, ochres and purples. Depictions of textures become more sophisticated especially in her depictions of Bajío landscapes. In these works, depictions of human beings all but disappear but those of what people create such as houses, roads and more still remain as a form of abstractive figurativism. Her last works were produced between 1978 and 1979 and include Ladera and Niebla. The works create an impression of large space that extends beyond the frame with the eye traveling over the various colors of the work without stopping.