Kyle Agustines

Kyle Agustines sold shoes after high school — enough of them that at 18, as a store manager, he earned a five-day business trip to five-star hotel in Nashville. But he wanted to go to college.

Agustines, who grew up in Fairbanks, chose UAF for financial reasons, even though he thought he’d soon move to an exclusive art school.

“I ended up not doing that because I fell in love with what was being taught here,” he said. “I was like ‘You know, actually, I feel like me and UAF are a good fit.’”

Agustines is entering his senior year and working on a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He pursues opportunities to display “nonobjective” paintings throughout the Fairbanks community.

“I wasn’t what I’d consider a technically skilled artist when I started at UAF, but, man, they really teach you how to do things,” he said. “I’ve really grown as a person and as an artist in ways that I never would have expected.”

Changing focus

Agustines said he first wanted to learn to draw and paint realistically when he entered UAF as a freshman.

“It’s super impressive when people can do that,” he said. “It shows that they know what they’re doing. And also everyone can look at it and know what it is, because you’ve depicted as it exists in the real world. And I did that, and I was like ‘Wow this is boring for me.’”

He acknowledged that realistic art can carry meaning through the symbolism of the objects and composition.
But “it wasn’t doing enough for me,” he said. “So my work began to get increasingly more abstract and simplified and nonrepresentational to the real world.”

Now he primarily paints with acrylics in a range of styles.

“It’s not important to me necessarily that I create bodies of work limited to those styles,” he said. “I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in still seeing what’s still possible.”

Making it work

Agustines, whose family moved with the military, was born in Japan but has lived in Fairbanks since he was 5 years old.

At 18, he was promoted to manager of the local Journeys shoe store.

“I don’t know anybody else who has hired, fired, done all that stuff at 18 years old, so I felt pretty cool,” he said. “And I was making good money, too.”

The money put college in reach.

“Initially UAF was not even on my radar,” he said. “That’s because, admittedly, everyone who grows up in Fairbanks is like ‘I’m leaving as soon as I can and nobody is going to tell me otherwise.’”

Agustines applied to a few exclusive art schools, including the Northwest College of Art and Design. He was one of just a few dozen students accepted that year.

Finances made him rethink that plan, though. He looked into UAF’s arts program and liked what he saw.

“It’s a good school,” he said. “It’s not like we’re put on the map specifically for fine arts, which is what I wanted to do, but I was like, ‘You know what, I’m an ambitious driven person. I’ll just make it work.’ And I am.”