[7] The couple returned to Lac du Bonnet two years later in order to help his father run an Esso service station.
A subsequent exhibition in Toronto received a glowing review in The Globe and Mail, which got other art critics talking, including Arnold Edinborough of the Financial Post, who declared Kost "one of the great finds.
[12][13][14] Kost's early style embraced a loose impressionism, but after discovering the work of realist painters such as Andrew Wyeth in the mid-late 1960s, he rediscovered the landscape of his childhood and eventually changed his approach.
As a symbol of re-commitment to realism, Kost destroyed many of his early abstract works,[1] and went on to burn hundreds of paintings that he was not satisfied with over the course of his career.
[15] His early influences included the Group of Seven, Tom Thomson, and French impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh.
[8] In 2002, The Winnipeg Free Press widely respected art critic Bill Redekop proclaimed: Kost married wife Grace Nejedly in 1959.
In the early 1990s, his band, the Ain't No Mountain Boys, played a side stage at the Winnipeg Folk Festival.