Two artists with roots on the central Kenai Peninsula are among this year’s cohort of Rasmuson Foundation individual artist awardees. Each will receive $10,000 to create or complete a project – in one case music about life in Nikiski and, in another, a book about being a caregiver to an elderly family member.
“Folk, definitely,” is how Keeley Boyle describes her music style. “I love jazz, and have for a long time. I love Americana music. I'd say, I try and meld my love for poetry with my love for folk and jazz.”
She says that’s what you’ll hear a lot of in her upcoming EP about her grandparents, Owen and Fleur Boyle, and their life in Nikiski. Boyle lives in Anchorage with her husband and kids. But she grew up in Old Town Kenai, going to the beach and admiring the mouth of the Kenai River.
Boyle says she got an early start in music due in part to having musical family members – her dad and uncle are also musicians. She started performing with them when she was in second grade. She grew up playing the Kenai Peninsula festival circuit, with gigs under her belt from Moose Pass, to Veronica’s Cafe, to a Weight Watchers benefit in Homer. And then came a band, with her now-husband Nelson Kempf.
“Kenai was very generous to me and my music my whole life,” she said. “And, to me, an incredibly musical community for such a small town it is. There's so much talent and focus on music that is very special.”
Boyle’s Rasmuson award is for music and music composition. She’ll use it to finish an EP, about her grandparents’ life in Nikiski that she started after they died.
“It's supposed to be sort of something celebratory, a gift to my family, that portrays our cherished world together,” she said.
Boyle describes the five-track EP as slices of life, in which the Kenai River, Kidney Lake and Cook Inlet are prominently featured alongside memories and descriptions of her favorite people and places. It’s mostly recorded, so now she’s turning to vocals, production and mixing.
Boyle’s favorite track doesn’t have a title yet, but for now she’s calling it “You Could Be a River Mouth” and describes it as a sort-of death song for anyone from Kenai. She says people should listen for her signature folksy Americana sound, with sounds of nylon string guitar, stand-up bass, horns and pedal steel.
She hopes listeners feel like they know her grandparents better after listening to the EP: Owen, a diver who helped build oil platforms, and Fleur, an active grandmother who managed the women’s resource and crisis center.
“They were incredible people, very, very special,” she said. “It's been a couple years, and I think my whole family is still reeling from the loss. They were intelligent, thoughtful, kind, loving, curious, quick to laugh, beautiful people that we were lucky to have care about and love us.”
Family is also central to the project Lester Nelson-Gacal is undertaking through the Rasmuson program. He’s a Soldotna-based designer and illustrator whose work focuses on branding and identity design for businesses.
“When you go to a company's website, or look at their sign, look at how their business looks inside, I can design all that,” he said.
He moved to Soldotna when he was three years old and later spent time at the Art Institute of Portland, in Puyallup and in the Philippines, where he ran a charity called the Ferdinand Center for the Creative that focused youth design outreach. A quick tour of his business website, Lesterco, evokes feelings of nostalgia he attributes to being raised by older parents.
“They look like they could have been done in the 50s, which I think lends them more of a timelessness,” he said of his designs.
Nelson-Gacal is using his Rasmuson award to produce a set of books about the last year of his dad’s life following a major fall. After that, his dad struggled with his memory and Nelson-Gacal served as his primary caretaker.
“Probably the primary theme of the book will be my dad's relationship with me as his gay son, which is one of the most defining aspects of our relationship, because that's the relationship I had with him, that – nobody else had that relationship with him,” he said.
Nelson-Gacal is working with a bookbinder friend in Texas to assemble the project, which will incorporate ink images on silk screens, letterpress imprints, illustrations and exposed binding – all wrapped in a yellow silicone “fall risk” bracelet. He says creating a book was an obvious way for him to tell his story, which will explore themes of identity and depression.
“After this accident, my dad lost his memory, and he thought for a good long time – he thought we were living in the 1980s and that we were still living in very rural Woodland, Washington and that he was, you know, this conservative farm-bred mechanic,” Nelson-Gacal said. “And I had to come out to him multiple times a day, many times a day, show him photos of him at me and my husband's wedding in Seldovia, and each and every time he accepted me again.”
Now that he’s received the grant, Nelson-Gacal says he’s wrapping up the story and layout before sending it off for printing. He plans to sell copies of the final product on his website.
