Fine artist Rhea Haggart Costello of Gloversville is well-known for capturing the beauty of Nature and the Adirondacks in her meticulously detailed and dynamic oil paintings. Through the masterful interplay of light, shadow, color, and composition, this gifted artist imbues each painting with such stunning realism that viewers feel like they are right there, immersed in a verdant forest or standing beside a shimmering lake or stream. 

Rhea spent most of her formative years under the open skies of northern California. Largely self-taught, she credits her parents for nurturing her love of artistic expression early in life. Her mother filled Rhea’s preschool years with diverse art projects, and Rhea’s engineer father was forever doodling detailed ideas or playing his jovial ragtime music on the piano, banjo, accordion or harmonica. Inspiring art teachers also helped foster the youth’s creativity.

With each passing year, Rhea knew she was destined to become an artist. But after taking art classes in her first year of college, and realizing the proposed curriculum didn’t meet her needs, Rhea decided to leave school and chart her own artistic path. Intrigued by the work of renowned oil painters Maxfield Parrish and Robert Bateman, Rhea was determined to develop her own distinctive style of painting.

“In my twenties, I took a number of group art classes with Nancy Jung in Gloversville to learn how to mix and apply oil paints,” she recalls. “Before Nancy moved away, she asked me to take over her classes. I taught for seven years and really enjoyed it.”

Rhea’s students encouraged her to bring her paintings to a gallery, and in 2001—after seriously pursuing painting for more than a decade—her first painting was accepted at the Adirondack Rustics Gallery in Schroon Lake. “It sold very quickly,” she recalls, “which definitely boosted my confidence. After that, I went on to do a number of shows.”

For 17 years, Rhea was active at the Adirondack Experience Museum in Blue Mountain Lake as an artist-in-residence and participant in the annual Rustic Fair, a show spotlighting classic and contemporary handcrafted Adirondack furniture, furnishings, and paintings. Impressed by the talented woodworkers she met there, Rhea began commissioning different ones to create unique rustic frames for her paintings. “My son, Larry Costello, made quite a few frames for me. They’re my favorites,” she adds proudly. “Larry worked with custom furniture maker Jonathan Sweet for many years and now works with Teakwood Builders.”

From the start, Rhea knew her pottery needed to be distinctive. “Recalling the old saying, ‘paint what you know,’ I started thinking about my love of hiking and horses, embracing the feel of my Jack Leadley packbasket straps as I hike and the feel of a horse’s reins in my hands. That’s when I came up with my leather-strapping idea and the different embellishments that I do. It’s all ceramic, but people often think the leather, grommets, and stitching is real. All the stitching is hand-drawn. But some impressions are drawn with actual grommets, bolts, nuts, or screws, and many of them have multi-impressions within the grommet.”

Despite the steep learning curve involved in mastering the technical aspects of pottery-making, Rhea took right to it, savoring its physicality and the speed with which a piece could be created. “Working with clay is very freeing because it involves a lot of movement. With painting, I’m sitting still for long stretches because my work is so detailed. I can make a mug or even a larger piece like a pitcher much more quickly than a painting, and since I need to make several pieces to fill the kiln before firing, I enjoy the feeling of creating a body of work.

“If I accidentally put a hole in a painting,” she muses, “it’s heartbreaking because I’ve spent so much time creating it, and it can’t be repaired. If a vase breaks—even a $500 piece like the one that danced off a shelf during a concert in a gallery!—it’s not great either, but it’s not 60-100 hours’ worth of work.”

Since the pandemic, Rhea hasn’t been pursuing painting and pottery quite as vigorously as before. “My mother has some health issues, so I’ve been traveling between New York and California more frequently these past few years. And since the birth of my first grandchild three years ago,” she adds, beaming, “I’ve been happily involved in his life, enjoying this special time with him. I have my materials all ready to go. But, for now, I work when time allows.”

To honor the vibrant part Rhea’s parents have played in her life, she signs all her work either Rhea or Rhea Haggart. The artist’s distinctive oil paintings and leather-strapped pottery can be seen at the William Coffey Gallery in Northville, the L. Post Rustic Gallery in Lake Placid, and online at facebook.com/rheacostelloart.