Meet the Artists: Steven Dragan

He learned to see in an architecture sketchbook. Today the Kansas City painter builds swimmers, skiers and canoers out of thick, deliberate strokes of paint. Here is how an architect became a painter of leisure.

October 28, 2026By Gaia on Main

Steven Dragan in his studio with Swimming in Color paintings

This story is part of Meet the Artists, a series in which we introduce the people behind the work on our walls in Park City and Sun Valley: how they work, what moves them, and how they got here.

From across the room, it looks like a summer afternoon seen from high above: a pool or a lake full of light, dotted with tiny swimmers. Step closer to a Steven Dragan painting and the scene comes apart into ridges of thick paint, each one set down on purpose. “At first glance, my paintings may appear detailed,” he writes, “but upon closer inspection, they reveal themselves as a series of intentional, simplified brushstrokes.”

Steven is a Kansas City painter with a background in architecture. He studied architecture at the University of Kansas and spent more than a decade as an architect, including time as a principal at TK Architects in Kansas City, before painting took over. Today he works full time from a public studio and gallery in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District.

His heavy body acrylic paintings of swimmers, skiers and canoers are scenes of leisure built from pattern and texture. Four of them now hang in our galleries, and every one is available through both Gaia on Main in Park City and Gaia Sun Valley in Ketchum.

“My work is a playful exploration of people, pattern and texture, where each stroke is intentional and on display.”
Steven Dragan

Where it began: a sketch journal

Steven’s art did not start in an art class. It started in architecture school. “My background is actually in architecture,” he told Leawood City Lifestyle. “It was there at KU that I started a sketch journal.”

In a 2022 segment on Kansas City Spotlight, he explained what that journal was for: “In architecture school they make you keep a journal. It’s basically a sketchbook of all the places you’re learning about, and it teaches you to focus on perspective and details and lighting.” At first he filled it with the buildings he studied. Then, as he told Leawood City Lifestyle, with “the places I was, or the places I wanted to be.” The sketches slowly grew into paintings.

Making art was not something he expected to do. “I almost never created any art because I thought it was only for ‘artists.’ … Had I let those misconceptions and fears guide my decisions, I would have missed out on one of the richest parts of my life.”

On an earlier version of his website, Steven told the story in another way, starting with a childhood ritual. Every summer, standing with his “feet in 3 inches of water, at the edge of the lake,” he picked one rock to bring home “to serve as a reminder of the summer.” Years later, on a trip to New Mexico, he made a quick five-minute sketch of each garden, plaza and restaurant along the way. Back home, he wrote, the sketchbook “became a treasure. It reminded me of the rocks I would collect as a kid. A piece of a place I loved to remind me why I went there. I never looked back.”

The habit of drawing places goes back even further. Standing on the grounds of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis in 2022, he said that what the Arch means to him most is personal: “the memories I have of being a child here sketching the Arch.”

From architect to full-time painter

Steven kept sketching through his architecture career. “I spent over a decade working as an architect,” he writes, “learning how to see space, light, and sketch people quickly—how to tell a story with a scene.” At TK Architects, where he was a principal, he also led an annual concept session.

His paintings of local scenery began to win him a following, and the art gradually pushed the architecture aside. “That’s something that I just continued with as I had a career in architecture,” he said, “and at some point that took over, and now I’m doing full-time art.”

For years his subject was place. He painted Kansas City’s Union Station and the Liberty Memorial, and St. Louis landmarks from the Fox Theatre to Forest Park. “My art is about connection to places,” he told IN Kansas City magazine in 2020. On television two years later he explained why: “When you focus on it for hours at a time, searching for the details that make it what it is, you capture a little piece of that place.”

In 2022 the Gateway Arch Park Foundation partnered with him for its gala, “An Iconic Evening.” He painted the Arch for the fundraiser. “As an enthusiast of St. Louis and an enthusiast of architecture, I believe that places matter a lot,” he said. What moves him about the structure is “the simplicity and the beauty of that natural form that is naturally made when you hang a chain upside down. It’s just such a simple, pure, romantic idea.” And about the job itself: “I get to do a painting. That’s what I love to do.”

Inside the studio

Steven’s studio and gallery in the Crossroads invites you to look in. “One thing you’ll notice is these big windows,” he said in a January 2026 studio video on his Instagram. “It’s fantastic for natural light, but what I really like is that you can look in them and see what I’m working on. So it’s like the artwork process is on display as much as the art.”

On why he paints what he paints, he doesn’t claim to have a neat answer. “A lot of times I don’t really know exactly why I’m painting something specifically, but I feel like I need to do it,” he said in a July 2024 studio video. “It’s like, it’s almost like I want that imagery to exist in the world.”

How he works: thick paint and quick figures

For years Steven painted mostly in watercolor, and in 2022 he still called it his primary medium. He loved it for being hard to control. “My favorite medium is watercolor, and the reason I like watercolor is because it’s unpredictable,” he said in 2022. “It’s like having another person next to you, kind of with their own personality, that’s adding to the painting.”

His newer work, including all four paintings at GAIA, is made with heavy body acrylic, a thick paint that holds the mark of every stroke. He builds each painting in layers, mixing his colors by hand and letting each layer dry before the next session. The surface is what you notice first: rippling water, wind-blown snow and light are all made of separate, raised strokes.

The people are the opposite: tiny, and painted fast. On his website he describes painting them “minimally and quickly, similar to the rapid gestures of an architectural napkin sketch.” In a studio tour he filmed in February 2024, he showed a canvas in progress and said he was playing with the idea of “figures and form and the way they are portrayed with negative space.”

That gap between what you see from far away and what is really on the canvas is the point. “It speaks to the human instinct to form meaning,” he writes, “much like children who search for shapes in clouds or faces in everyday objects.”

In the fall of 2024 he pushed that idea even further. Standing in front of a new canvas in an October 2024 studio video, he described a pared-down direction: “What I like about this one is it’s really minimizing everything and just kind of taking it down to its essence. So it’s almost like calligraphy or texture when you look at it, but when you get a little closer, it’s just human forms.”

Swimmers, skiers and canoers: the paintings at GAIA

“My work explores the human form through patterns that depict scenes of leisure, both real and imagined,” Steven writes. Rest, time together and time alone are his themes, and you can see all of them in the four paintings at GAIA.

Swimming in Color. This is Steven’s signature series. In the larger of our two paintings with this name, the water is a deep green, broken by flecks of blue, pink, yellow and white, like light on the surface or flowers floating on it. Only after a moment do you find the swimmers, small figures scattered across the lower part of the canvas.

Swimming in Color by Steven Dragan, tiny swimmers in deep green water flecked with color — Swimming in Color, Steven Dragan. Heavy Body Acrylic on Canvas, Oak frame, 73.5 x 49.5 in. Available through both of our galleries.

The second Swimming in Color is narrower and set vertically: deep blue water seen from above, with dozens of swimmers in red and orange spread across it. The ripples are painted as a net of raised white lines that catch the light.

Swimming in Color by Steven Dragan, swimmers in red and orange in deep blue water seen from above — Swimming in Color, Steven Dragan. Heavy Body Acrylic on Canvas, Oak frame, 37.5 x 49.5 in. Available through both of our galleries.

Skiers. For a gallery in ski country, this one feels close to home. Almost the whole canvas is white, a field of thick, sculpted strokes that reads as fresh snow. Near the lower left, two small skiers cut across the slope, each with a blue shadow.

Skiers by Steven Dragan, two small skiers on a field of thick white paint — Skiers, Steven Dragan. Heavy Body Acrylic on Canvas, Oak frame, 25.5 x 37.5 in. Available through both of our galleries.

Canoers. The quietest of the four. The water moves from green at the top to deep blue at the bottom, and the whole surface is covered in small, rippling strokes. Off to the left, a single canoe drifts with its paddlers, a tiny moment of calm in a very big lake.

Canoers by Steven Dragan, a single canoe on water that shifts from green to deep blue — Canoers, Steven Dragan. Heavy Body Acrylic on Canvas, Oak frame, 73.5 x 49.5 in. Available through both of our galleries.

See Steven Dragan’s paintings available through both of our galleries →

Recognition

Steven shows his work at nationally juried art fairs. In 2024 the Lawrence Arts Center in Lawrence, Kansas, presented his exhibition People & Patterns, built around his figure paintings. In 2026 he won a bronze award for painting at the Coconut Grove Arts Festival in Miami.

In 2026 he was also one of the exhibiting artists at the Park City Kimball Arts Festival in Utah.

In September 2026 he showed at the Plaza Art Fair in Kansas City, which he called his “hometown show.” “Plaza has one of the best reputations among the exhibiting artists,” he told KCTV5. “It feels like a big party with a lot of art.”

Steven Dragan’s work at GAIA

These paintings by Steven are available through both of our galleries. Each one is an original, and the texture of the thick paint really shows in person.

See all of Steven Dragan’s work →

From a sketch journal in architecture school to the mountains of Utah and Idaho: every one of Steven’s paintings at GAIA is available through both of our galleries. Come and see them in person. Plan your visit →

Steven also creates custom work through Gaia. His Swimming in Color series is one he paints on commission in custom sizes, so a pool scene can be made for a particular wall, room or home. If you’d love a one-of-a-kind piece made for your space, contact us at either of our galleries.

Questions about a piece? Contact us at either of our galleries: Park City 435-731-8376 · Sun Valley 208-973-0137 · Contact us online →

Available through both of our galleries

Gaia on Main, 314 Main Street, Park City, Utah
Gaia Sun Valley, 659 Sun Valley Road, Ketchum, Idaho

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Sources

Park City · Sun Valley

See the work in person

Every work is available through both galleries: 314 Main Street, Park City, and 659 Sun Valley Road, Ketchum.

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