At 37,
Keeley Steele is an East End icon.
Splashy newspaper stories reported
repeatedly on The Bluegrass Kitchen, the organic restaurant she
opened with her husband last October on the corner of Elizabeth and
Washington streets.
She made headlines again last
February when she staged an art exhibit featuring nudes in her Art
Space Gallery above the restaurant.
Her name also pops up in print as a
prize-winning sculptor who turns everyday junk into offbeat works of
art.
In a few months, the visionary
artist/entrepreneur will be back in the limelight with a new venture
— a sandwich shop on Washington Street across from the Bluegrass
Kitchen.
Just who is this media darling,
this prolific, high-profile symbol of East End rebirth?
“I don’t remember my life without
art. My father has always been very tactile. He dabbled in pottery
for a while, and watercolors. He’s a builder and likes well-crafted
things. I was under his feet quite a bit. I think I grew up with a
need to get my hands into things.
“I have a little book that my
sixth-grade teacher made up where I said I wanted to be a
psychologist. I took psych classes in college but that never
materialized. I could never be quiet long enough to listen to other
people. I was always busy gluing something to something.
“I went to WVU for a year and a
half and finished up at the University of Charleston. I have a
master of fine arts in painting from the University of Kentucky.
“I pretty much stopped painting a
while back. I never felt like I ever quite got it right. When I
started doing sculpture, I felt I had finally found my calling. I’ve
always been a collector of massive amounts of matter. I finally
decided I could let some of that go into sculptures instead of
harboring it all in jars and boxes in my workspace.
“When you go to grad school, the
idea is that you will eventually be teaching college. I took a
teaching job at Middle Tennessee State and lived on a farm by
myself, just me and my two cats. I had to drive through a creek to
get home. I only had wood heat. I would walk into a room and people
would say, ‘What’s burning?’ I’d say, ‘Oh, that’s just me.’
Everything I owned was infiltrated with smoke.
“I taught about a year there, and
summer came, and I went into Nashville about 60 miles away and took
a bartending job. Sixty miles was just too far to commute, so I just
moved to Nashville.
“For another year, I bartended in
Nashville and made more money than I did teaching. I wasn’t cut out
to be a teacher. I think it takes a special person to do that. But I
have dabbled in it. I take a couple of years off and think, well,
maybe now I’m old enough that I can do it right. I taught out at the
state penitentiary one semester and at West Virginia Tech last
winter. Finally I decided that was it.
“I always thought I needed to be
someplace where the lights were shinier and the opportunities were
bigger, but Nashville was very fast-paced for me, and it was hard to
get a grip on what I was going to be doing. So I thought I’d come
home for a year and decide the next step. Apparently, it was getting
married and having a child.
“Jon was still here. We met in high
school when I worked at Budget Records and he was a deejay and came
in to buy records. It was years before we ever really got together.
I don’t think we ever actually dated. We just got married.
“I moved back here in 1998. I think
he was starting to get tired of the bar business [Empty Glass]. I
tell him we got married because we were tired. Neither of us wanted
to date anymore and we didn’t like the bar business and the hours,
so we decided to get married.
“We closed the bar and Jonathan
proceeded to go out in the world and try to find a job, which proved
to be very difficult for somebody who’s really never had a boss. You
would think someone who is self-motivated and sets their own goals
would be valued in the corporate work force, but that was not the
case.
“Six months later, I was pregnant.
I stayed home with my son for a year and a half and Jonathan took a
job with an insurance agency. Two years later, he was on blood
pressure medication. I told him, ‘Stop!’
“I had a little studio next door by
then and had really started to concentrate on my art work. I did
antique refinishing and restoration and had a nice, little business.
It was the only thing in this building.
“When I told Jon to quit his job,
we bought the building with the restaurant in mind. We both love
food and love going out to eat. For three years before we opened, we
had dinner parties every Sunday for anywhere from four to 15 people,
so that was our test kitchen.
“I’ve been very involved in cooking
for the last 15 years since I’ve been a vegetarian. There wasn’t a
lot out there, so I started teaching myself to cook and out of that
grew an idea.
“Of course, the restaurant was
supposed to be on a beach somewhere. That was our big plan, to open
a pizza shop or something at the beach. But the baby came, and my
parents are here, and now I’m fully vested in Charleston.
“We will be open a year in October,
but we worked on it for a year and a half. We’ve pretty much redone
the whole building. I’ve got Art Space upstairs, and I’m rehabbing
the place next door for my parents, my old studio. They’re going to
do an antique curio shop there.
“If I couldn’t do it on the East
End, I probably wouldn’t have opened a restaurant. It’s the
diversity. I knew these people and felt like I could empathize with
what they needed, and I knew what I missed from living other places,
and that’s what I was reaching for. Everyone has just been
overwhelmingly supportive to the point that we are going to open
another restaurant here on the East End.
“The menu isn’t finalized because
we do everything by the seat of our pants, but it’s not going to be
as clean lined as this place. This place is doing great, but this
wasn’t our concept. Our concept was a little more casual and more
fast, a natural, organic sandwich shop.
“I had no intention of serving
things here on plates with silverware. We realized pretty quickly
that people were not going to just come to the counter and place an
order. It looks like the kind of place where you sit down at a table
and someone comes and waits on you. So that’s what we did.
“So we’re still looking to do the
first place we wanted — a little healthier version of fast food, a
tacky little beach shack in Charleston. It’s going to be right
across the street.
“I don’t know when we’re going to
open. Talk to the bank. I just sent my banker profit and loss
statements. We printed out pie charts and everything. He said it was
a great step up from the handwritten note on a napkin I brought him
last time.
“I haven’t been in a studio in
almost a year now with the restaurant opening. I’m starting to think
more about how I can design things and have them made. I’ve always
got sketchbooks with me. I write it down, sketch it out and stick it
in my purse. My husband says 90 percent of my problems are because
of that purse. It’s big and filled with a month’s worth of crap.
“In that period leading up to the
restaurant when I had a lot of time on my hands, I was pretty
prolific. I have a friend who has a nice gallery in Louisville and I
send stuff down to her. I’m selling quite a bit of it. Sometimes
it’s hard for me to give them up because I can’t make another one. I
become very connected to it.
“When I make art, I get to organize
and line things up. I find that my life is rather erratic and not
very organized, so that gives me some focus.
“I still want that shack on the
beach, but now I realize that I will always have a homestead in
Charleston. My parents live here in the house where my father was
born, so there is a sense of history that I feel connected to now.”
To contact staff writer Sandy
Wells, call 348-5173 or e-mail sandyw@wvgazette.com. |