If you had a chance to stop to talk to the man with waist-length dreads and paint-freckled cargo pants bringing to life a giant tangerine tiger and XXXL purple mountain laurels outside the Coates Student Center this week, you know he’s more than a painter. He’s also in the memory-making business. Trinity University hired San Antonio artist Nik “Soup” Soupe to paint a canvas mural with a blend of campus icons and imagery unique to the city it lives in. The multi-day project wraps up Thursday..
Muralists are, by nature, performance artists, doing their work in public spaces while people look on and ask questions. That’s just fine with Soupe. “I feel people need to share more things,” he says, and he’s just as willing to ask you what you’re listening to on Spotify right now and how school is going. “You never know who you’re influencing and inspiring.”
Trinity decided it was time to refresh the wall that sits in one of the most well-traveled spaces on campus with something that not only reflected Trinity’s identity but also represented the vibrant culture just off-campus in San Antonio. Soupe’s style was a natural first choice.
Taking in Soupe’s realistic rendering of 166-foot tall Murchison Tower (and have we mentioned the tiger?) is engaging enough, but he’s more than willing to climb down from his ladder to tell you how he got that tiger’s fuzz to look so touchably soft, or what magic he applied to those laurels that makes you feel like you can smell their grape soda perfume coming right off the wall.
Soupe knows the power of witnessing someone else creating art: “I saw someone painting a mural on the wall of a surf shop on South Padre Island when I was 12 years old, and I said ‘I’m going to do that,’” Soupe says. “It changed my life.” Soupe approached that artist several times in the following years to ask him questions, but the artist didn’t seem all that interested in mentoring the youngster. Once Soupe became an accomplished artist himself, he knew he didn’t want to be like that.
If you’ve seen Soupe’s artwork on walls around town, you know he’s famous for hyper-realistic portraits, often in black and white, of recognizable musicians like Ozzy Osbourne and, of course, Spurs players. In his collaboration with muralist Shek Vega called Los Otros, Soupe has been part of 117 commissioned murals, while also donating pieces and raising money for charity.
For the Trinity mural, Soupe embraced color and culture. The university gave Soupe some ideas of what they wanted on the mural and his partner, Christie Kaye, an artist and designer, composed a digital mock-up using Soupe’s style. “We went through and did our research about Trinity,” Kaye says. “We learned about the original 650-pound tiger (LeeRoy the mascot) and then obviously the laurels surround a lot of the iconic places on campus.”
The pair then used a projector to sketch the image onto the primed blank vinyl surface. Then it was time for paint. Soupe used stencils to apply talavera patterns and papel picado–nods to San Antonio culture. The project required 40 cans of paint in colors like “Venus Violet” and “Mango.”
Outdoor murals are subject to the elements, so they don’t last forever, and often they get painted over with something new that relates to the current social moment. In fact, Soupe painted a portrait of Spurs players on a wall on N. St. Mary’s St. during last season’s playoffs over the top of one of his previous paintings.
“It’s nice when the paintings last, but this is my attachment–the conversations that happen while I’m painting,” he says. “Every wall has this strange little bundle of memories to it, which is really, really beautiful.”