ART OF THE HULA BECKONS PAINTER
Julia Cost grew up on Maui studying dance and art, and now blends her two passions in Berkeley studio
You can practically hear the energized chanting of the hula dancers, the stomp of bare feet onstage, the clack and rattle of split-bamboo puili in Julia Cost’s paintings. But then, the Berkeley resident is a natural. Cost grew up steeped in both art and dance on Maui — passions that converge in her paintings of hula halau (troupes) in action at the renowned Merrie Monarch Festival in Hilo, Hawaii.
“Even when I was in school on Maui, I wanted my two arts to inform each other and saw them as informed,” says the artist, 27, at her Berkeley home and studio. “I grew to see them as more intertwined when I became a choreographer. ... As an artist, you’re choreographing a square of canvas. It’s so much about composition and creating these riveting moments. In dance, you have the wonderful luxury of choreographing something over time; with art, you’re trying to find the one moment that you really want to spend time carefully crafting on canvas.”
Cost also paints landscapes, an interest inherited from father Curtis Wilson Cost, who boasts the longest-running one-man gallery in the 50th state (inside Maui’s Kula Lodge since 1984), and grandfather James Peter Cost, a noted seascape artist who had a gallery in Carmel for 25 years. Still, she appreciates the special challenges of her hula canvases.
“I’m so interested in painting movement and the irony of capturing movement in a still image and how the image seems to resist stillness,” Cost says. “You sense the pressure of their sway. You sense they’re breathing in. So it feels like it’s vibrating, and it’s not just stagnant.”
Cost has been anything but static since moving to the Bay Area three years ago. She has not only worked as a summer program coordinator for the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and choreographed multiple shows at the Garage with Nine Shards, the dance theater collective she co-founded, but has also applied an entrepreneurial acumen to her artwork, in line with her forebears.
Cost sells gift certificates for wedding portraits and offers her latest paintings for sale in her own “gallery,” a.k.a. her website and Facebook page, while using social media to
“Even when I was in school on Maui, I wanted my two arts to inform each other and saw them as informed.” Julia Cost, painter
market her work. Earlier this year, for instance, she announced on Instagram that she would do 10 paintings, each 10 by 10 inches, in 10 days, at $100 apiece, working from images uploaded by hopeful buyers.
Collector Karolyn Stopper of Danville says she appreciates Cost’s “ability to draw or paint such high-quality work, her eye and her compositions. The colors are realistic, but she has the ability to just make it look alive.”
Cost “was very much an artistic prodigy,” says her father, recalling an infant who delighted in taking complex jigsaw puzzles apart and putting them back together — but upside down, with just the blank sides visible. Growing up in the upcountry Maui town of Kula, on the slopes of Haleakala, did have limitations, the younger artist says.
“The fact that I lived in such a rural place — it took 45 minutes to get to my dance classes and 20 minutes to get to school and the store — all I wanted after I graduated was to live in a place where I could walk everywhere and be a part of things,” Julia Cost says. “Living in the Bay Area is, like, wow, the entire city can be my school.”