RESUME
Artist and designer. College professor
Steven Cost is a tenured associate professor at Amarillo College teaching graphic design and art courses in the Visual Arts Department. He has an MFA in Graphic Design and a MA in Painting and another MA in Communication Arts. 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 – learning to draw and paint at an early age. Moving to Amarillo after seven years in Florida, he taught art and graphic design, and then pursued a full-time fine-art career working with a studio in the Las Tiendas art colony in Amarillo. He then taught graphic design at Southwestern Oklahoma State University. 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. 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.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.
PAINTING
Steven Cost is a painter. His works ranges from very large canvases of what he calls “earthscapes” to delicate watercolors or splashy and spontaneous oils. Lately, Cost is painting with watercolors on his own hand-made paper.
DRAWING
Cost teaches drawing classes at Amarillo College and 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 subjects drawn on location.
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. While teaching at Amarillo College, Cost is also an artist with a studio and gallery in Sunset Center in Amarillo.