Paul Soupiset delivered arts workshop at Laity Lodge conferences

This past week Toolbox Creative Director, Paul Soupiset, offered a Poetry Sketching arts workshop at Laity Lodge retreat center in the Texas hill country, offering participants a two-day creative session in both creating original poetry and hand lettering and illuminating finished poems.

Soupiset kicked off the first day’s creative exploration by encouraging retreatants to jump into a hands-on “redacive poetry” process, in the tradition of Austin Kleon’s ‘newspaper blackout’ poems and other redactive poetry.

“Poetry-by-subtraction is a great way to give large groups quick traction on the idea of creating original verse,” Soupiset said. “On the second day’s session, we took the resulting nespaper blackout poems, and begin a process of artistically transcribing the poems into a Moleskine Notebook sketchbook, using pigment liners and watercolor. I showed participants some simple ways to generate interesting lettering for those with no experience in calligraphy or hand lettering. Hopefully, having their sketches in a bound journal will provide people encouragement to continue sketching beyond the weekend.”

He continued, “The weekend’s theme was exploring privilege and power. I was interested in working with the idea of subverting texts of power — in this case, the texts mediated by modern, Western, privileged newspapers — by creating art from their stories. This allows the artist to sort of speak oneself into the story.”

The visual pieces were presented at the Cody Center at Laity Lodge and several individuals read their poems aloud prior to the last night’s concert by recording artist Sara Groves.

Update: Soupiset made several return trips back to Laity Lodge this fall and winter, leading similar poetry/art workshops for various sized retreat groups;