RESUME
Artist, designer, professor
Steven Cost is a tenured associate professor at Amarillo College teaching art and graphic design courses in the Visual Arts Department. He has an MFA in Graphic Design, a MA in Painting and another MA in Communication Arts (film and video). His undergraduate degree is a dual BA major in art and commercial art. Cost spent his youth among the Kiowa, Comanche and other tribes around the Anadarko and Lawton, Oklahoma area. He learning to draw and paint at an early age. Moving to Amarillo in 1979, after seven years in Florida, he taught art and graphic design for ten years at Texas State Technical College. In 1989, he pursued a full-time fine-art career working in his studio in the Las Tiendas art colony in Amarillo. After three years, he taught graphic design as full-time faculty at Southwestern Oklahoma State University and continued his fine art career as well. This was followed by three years as the art director and photographer for the Amarillo Observer magazine. He returned to teaching when he accepted a position as the head of the commercial art department at Texas State Technical College. In 1995 TSTC was merged with Amarillo College where he has been teaching art and graphic design since.
Steven Cost established his art studio and gallery in November 2007 at The Galleries at Sunset Center where there are 56 art galleries under one roof. Cost has been represented in art galleries and exhibits in Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach, Florida; Taos, New Mexico; Amarillo and Austin, Texas, Oklahoma City, Lawton, and Anadarko, Oklahoma.
PAINTING
Steven Cost paints landscapes in acrylics and watercolors. His strong compositions combine expressive textured and painterly applications contrasted with areas of detailed subject matter. Also he paints figures and portraits, illustrates books, magazines, and web sites. His favorite college course that he teaches is Painting I and II. Cost is proud that his students learn abstract and realism in several techniques under his curriculum.
DRAWING
Cost teaches drawing classes at Amarillo College, including figure drawing. He believes that his students need to explore many drawing media and techniques — advise he takes for himself. He constantly draws, both large-scale completed drawings suitable for framing, as well as filling up sketchbooks of compositions drawn on location.
HANDMADE BOOKS AND COLLAGES
“I have been making art from age five, back when my mother would bring home old ledger books from the family insurance and real estate business for me to draw. So these were kind of like the old Native American Indian ledger books the tribal recorders would use during the Reservation days since the tribes no longer had access to buffalo hides or deer skins as they did for centuries before. You might say that my first art endeavors were actually altered books,” Cost says.
Using the paper in many of his creations, unique books may hold his art or items he has collected. Cost says that creating the unique books allows him to combine most of the art skills he enjoys into a single art form. Also to be found are what are called “altered books.” These are hardback books that have new life breathed into them. For instance, one such tome was formerly a book about computer graphics and the internet. It now seems to be a leather-bound manuscript from the Middle Ages. Quite a contrast! Wall hangings feature large handmade paper sheets with a myriad of objects and textures collaged into intriguing compositions. Assembling the collages and montages is spontaneous and personal with thought provoking images and intuitive from the heart. Texture seems to be a big thing for Cost, because it is a thread running throughout every piece.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
In 1975, Steven Cost finished four years duty with the U. S. Navy and immediately went to work as the art director of Commercial Impression Advertising Agency in Pensacola, Florida. While in Pensacola he was a package designer for St. Regis Paper Company, and art directed for Creative Consultants Advertising. He also finished his MA in Communication Arts at The University of West Florida where he studied video production and filmmaking. In 1993 he became the art director for the Amarillo Observer Magazine and designed for the publication for several years, one of the graphic design positions he enjoyed the most. For a while, Steven teamed up with son, Chris Cost, a videographer and animator, in producing television commercials. Cost continues to design and art direct in video, web, and print.
 |
|
| With David Carson, avant garde designer |