Steven Dragan

Steven Dragan is a Kansas City painter known for vast, imagined scenes of leisure built around people. Drawing on decades in architecture, he uses a few deliberate marks to bring a space to life. From a distance his paintings look full of detail and activity, but up close a single figure may take as few as five strokes.

In his best-known series, Swimming in Color, he shapes thick acrylic into a waterlike texture with his fingertips, works fluid color into it by hand, and paints the figures last. Dragan runs a public studio and gallery in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District, and his work is in the collections of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States and American Century Investments. Studio E Gallery in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, represents Steven Dragan.