Craig Costello

Craig Costello is a Brooklyn-based artist utilizing experimentation and invention as essential roles in his process. For over a decade, he has developed tools for creating art by re-purposing and modifying devices and objects not often associated with fine art, including fire extinguishers, garden sprayers, and shoe polish bottles. Like paint brushes, the tools are an extension of his hand, allowing him to achieve unique marks of varying scale and control.  This series presents a more formal painting approach, still leaving a sense of Costello's physical presence in the works where movements are traceable and gestures have a distinguished beginning and end. His interest in the balance of controlled and uncontrolled features is present where cascading paint is dictated by both gravity and the pressure applied in the process. The forms are comparable to traditional shapes in that they are simple and classic, but do not strive to be perfect. Costello's formal art education began with photography and expanded to minimalism and conceptual art. This practice carried over into the street where he was a traditional graffiti writer. He eventually stopped writing his name and painted minimal, gestural marks that created his signature drip, with one of his favorite surfaces being mailboxes, which began as objects and transformed into sculptures.