From Nelore to Double Decker

Virginia Costa went from the Nelore cattle to the Double Decker. What do I mean by that? Virginia Costa is a Brazilian, visual artist, great-granddaughter, granddaughter, and daughter of the farmers who first introduced the Nelore cattle from India into Brazil. The Double Decker is that English two floored red bus.
Unlike most visual artists who started painting since they were kids, Virginia Costa started at adult age, five years ago. She took interest in painting while watching her son´s friend, who was staying at her house, a young German girl, also a visual artist, paint all throughout the day. Inspired by the little German, who took pictures to then draw and paint, she started, and didn’t stop ever since.
Without realizing it, she did what lots of North American artists have been doing since 1965. It was in that decade that hyper-realism was born in America. Without the picture, the hyper-realism painting wouldn’t exist.
In 1973, in New York, Soho, at Prince Street, in the Louis Meisel Gallery, I saw an exhibition of hyper-realists that had been commissioned by the eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, owner of TWA and petroliferous companies. The one from the movie The Aviator, with Leonardo Di Caprio. The exhibition gathered all the major hyper-realists.
Hughes’s only demand was that every painting should have a plane on it. They all did. Who told me this detail was Hughes´s lawyer, at an encounter we had at his office at the Pan American Building. Meisel then told me the artists’ reaction to his request.
Now looking at Virginia´s 20 x 30 cm paintings of London’s urban landscape, scenes of that exhibition in New York come back to my mind.
There are similarities between Virginia Costa and the hyper-realists. Specially with those that find in urban landscapes, in restaurants, in bars, in shopping windows, in gas stations, motivation to paint.
Living  about an hour from São Paulo, in São José dos Campos, Virginia Costa is tracing in her studio the same path that Richard Estes, David Cone and others traced and are still tracing.
Just a few artists in Brazil have adopted this hard toilsome and arduous style.  João Calixto, already gone, was one of them.
Now, without loud announcements and fireworks, Virginia Costa arrives modestly in São Paulo with her detailed, virtuous work. Finding this work nowadays is a unique joy. It is good to feel it.
In her trips to the United Kingdom to visit her daughter who’s been living in London for years, she took pictures of stores, pubs, bars, restaurants, markets, fairs, the famous black cabs the two floored bus and the traditional red phone booths.
In a not common, inspiring picture, she managed to gather three of these typical London symbols in just a single shot. From inside a double decker, through the door, she captured a phone booth and a cab.
The painting that opens this article is in London. Still this year, when the London´s Transport Museum reopens, it will be part of its collection.
For a person who started yesterday, Virginia Costa, thanks to her determination and hard work, managed to have a painting at a London Museum. Rare thing.
Luck? I don’t think so!! It’s talent.

São Paulo, July 8th 2007
Carlos von Schmidt
Curator and art critic
Virginia Costa is represented in São Paulo by  Novaandrégaleria
Rua Estados Unidos 2280
Fone: 55 11 3081-6664