Paul Soupiset is an artist, musician, worship and liturgy leader, graphic designer, editor, typophile and armchair theologian. Paul and his wife Amy have four beautiful kids. He was born in 1969 in San Antonio, ten minutes before his twin brother, Mark.

Currently a graphic designer in San Antonio, Paul has served as the creative director and lead designer at Toolbox Studios since its inception in 1996.

Soupiset’s design work has been featured in the pages of Communication Arts, Graphis, Print Magazine, How Magazine, Step Magazine and Creativity design annuals. His design awards also include an IABC International Gold Quill, nods from the CASSA Golden Jalapeños, and a CD design nomination in Nashville’s annual Dove Awards. Soupiset has received recognition from juried competitions across the state of Texas, including The Dallas Show and Austin’s South by Southwest (sxsw) interactive competition. His design work has been recognized in leading national design competitions and his work has received local, regional and national ADDY awards, including a local Best of Show.

In 1991, Soupiset graduated Baylor University with a degree in journalism and studio art. His personal work also includes songwriting, poetry, and photography. Paul blogs at soupablog.com.

EL: How did you first think of creating a graphic supplement to the Lectionary?

PS: The idea germinated a few years ago while I was planning weekly worship services for a fledgling faith community here in San Antonio. Part of my weekly preparations was to design and create a printed order of worship. One of the ways I would process the lectionary text was to create these liturgical sketches, usually inspired by ancient — Celtic or Byzantine — themes. Some of those resultant ideas, poems, or sketches would find their way into the worship service. “Wouldn’t it be cool to open a book full of this stuff?” became the question. I’m not sure who voiced it first, me or another person in the community.

About this time I also became re-acquainted with the liturgical illustrations of Steve Erspamer — a Marianist monastic whose amazing work has been mis-categorized by some as nothing more than liturgical clip art. His work focuses on the liturgical calendar, so I’m sure that was a part of the inspiration. The style of the book is growing organically but combines traditional and digital elements.

EL: When you are drawing or designing, do you think of your creativity as worship?

PS: Definitely. I see every creative act as worship — participation in the Imago Dei — as long as I am being present to the creative action at hand, and being thankful to and aware of God during the process, worship happens. The amazing thing with most of the arts is that there’s sacredness in the conception, then sacredness in the creative action or execution or performance, and then, quite apart from the artist, there’s this recurring sacredness dealing with the artifact itself. When a melody comes into my head, I can praise God for the gift of song; after practice and refinement, when I perform the composition, there’s this second time that worship happens, then a third moment of worship if that song is recalled by someone the next day while they work — or if some jazz pianist comes along and quotes the melody in a new composition, or if the lyrics spark the idea for a painting.

When I am drawing, sketching, painting on my own time, for my own purposes, at my own speed, I am usually aware of this and use the time as a kind of prayer-rhythm. However, when I am drawing or designing or art directing and it’s not on my own time, like up at the studio, it’s usually not until the end product that I’m able to look back and see something that may glorify God.

EL: As a web designer you work in a digital environment, and do not necessarily ever have to meet people face to face. In this new type of digital business world, how are you a witness to your non-Christian clientele?

PS: In the hundred of clients I’ve had, there have been probably fewer than a dozen that I haven’t met face-to-face. So, although the final execution of much of my work is digital, the vast majority of my creative work-life involves the messiness of real people and face-to-face meetings and spilled coffee and coughs and sneezes and co-workers dropping in to vent and all that stuff. I’m not very cloistered at all during my 40-hour-a-week career as a graphic designer, and with four kids, my wife and I are not very cloistered during the rest of the hours of the week, either. I guess for those reasons I tend to romanticize the monastic life. You can also see why I feel the need to steal away almost every lunch, and try to sketch.

But back to your question: I feel that as a Christ-follower, I’m called to simply be a witness, to let my work be another witness, and then to back off and let that witness be what it is, tattered and torn and bruised and faltering as it is. Then in strange ways the kingdom of God breaks-in and you get to participate — in that sense the witness is usually conversation- and story-centric, and less often design-centric. Those kingdom stories usually center around co-workers and associates and summer interns and job applicants and vendors and the folks that make my coffee next door probably more than it does my clientele, or at least in more visible ways.

EL: Anyone who visits your blog will see very quickly that you have your hand in many different creative arts. You are creating the graphic art lectionary, you have art for sale, you have moleskine drawings, you are involved in church music---do these different arts interact with each other in your mind? Do your drawings become paintings, chords become drawings, artwork become a musical expression?

PS: I wish I were that integrated! Sure, sometimes a pencil sketch has grown into a painting, or a haiku gives way to a poem — which then gives way to a song lyric, but I think most of the time it’s more of a case of cross-pollination of motifs. There are little themes that come out again and again just because of who I am and the places I’ve traveled or the books that I’ve read — my music and my sketches both contain vague literary references, they elevate wordplay, they frequently invoke angels and saints, coffee and water, wine and bread, performative symbols, as the late Bob Webber would’ve said, that trade in deeper meanings.

One exception is a poem I wrote ten or twelve years ago, Appreciating Your Chicago: the words have resurfaced as a song, as a painting, and as a resultant photograph.

EL: Makoto Fujimura, the increasingly popular abstract artist, once said of art critics that, "They don't know what shelf to categorize my works on. They do see the obvious religious dimension, but, even if they like it, it is out of their semantics as contemporary critics." Do you find that in the creative arts critics and artists no longer can engage with religious expression or metaphor?

PS: I think that critics, like many of us, are tired of Christians, sitting distanced and disengaged from culture, then creating art-as-propaganda and complaining when it doesn’t find currency in the art discourse. So, much of their critique is valid. Very few artists have learned how to authentically integrate their faith-expression and the zeitgeist. Mr. Fujimura has obviously found a vocabulary for both, as have others — Mary McCleary and their cadre at CIVA and IAM comes to mind. Once the artist’s authentic vocabulary is in use, art ceases to become pedantic or prescriptive.

EL: When creating your liturgical sketches, do you have a palette for each season of the Church calendar? Do you emphasize the colors of each season in the corresponding sketches? Or is your work more abstract than that?

PS: I don’t prepare specific palettes for each season, but stay aware of liturgical colors and pay homage to them from time to time in my sketches. For Liturgical Sketching, I’ve been more intentional about this than usual, and find myself going back and tweaking works once they’ve been digitized to have a color flow from page to page. Unrelated, I was able to create a liturgical color palette for a Presbyterian church in Austin, Texas, and I really enjoyed the process; they recently came back to me and asked me to add a new light blue for their Advent usage.

EL: Graphic art has been much maligned as inferior to the novel or nonfiction works. Graphic novels, save for the works of Frank Miller or Art Spiegelman, are treated as second class citizens in the literary world. Have you though of any ways to rid the world of this dichotomy? Do you have to argue against it, or is the best way to let the art speak for itself?

PS: I think time will shift the emphasis. I am one who believes that as we move out of the Enlightenment project, we shed our reliance upon language and its certitudes. The last half-century we’ve been easing into a long post-discursive era wherein symbol will reign supreme over words. Those who would pounce at Spiegelman will eventually skitter off into the distance or die off.

EL: What do you count as artistic influences?

PS: Urban decay, found objects, Faulkner, Byzantine iconographers, the journals of Dan Eldon, Von Glitschka, da Vinci’s journals, letterpress make-readies, long lunches in small off-the-beaten-path cafés, Sigur Ros videos, Shakespeare, Marlo Chase, Neil Finn, Steve Erspamer, Hatch Show Print, Robert Tatum, Patricia Soupiset’s sculpture, watercolor, painting, batik, and stained glass work; the writers of the Psalms, Fauré, Erik Spiekermann, Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler.

EL: In particular, in your liturgical sketches, do you seek out art such as Eastern Orthodox ikons or the artwork of the early church to find liturgical inspiration? Any other Christian influences?

PS: I typically go to the texts first, and then sketch. If I choose to quote from an earlier ikon, I may go research and emulate. I pretty willingly throw myself into the great stream of tradition we have in pre-modern Christian art — both Western and Eastern. I may be as inspired by a Celtic gravestone as I am by a bookbinder’s gold leaf tooling on the edges of an Anglican Daily Office. Both are little visual artifacts that add to a grand vocabulary.

But my influences and inspirations are myriad. I’m working on a sculptural series that may take me another year, it’s the Stations of the Cross, and my visual influences on that particular piece are only modern and secular in nature.

EL: Once the Year B liturgical sketches are finally finished, what is the game plan from there?

PS: Pray that a publisher is willing to take them to press: it’s an uphill battle, though: very few out there would be willing to publish a full-color-throughout book from an unknown artist. Luckily I’ve had quite a few pastors who have let me know they’d gladly stock their pews with multiple copies if it ever sees the light of day.

Then it would be time to start Year C, of course!

Find out more about Paul at:

http://paulsoupiset.com/
http://soupiset.typepad.com/illustration/
http://soupablog.com/