Meet Ohio-based Artist Paul WolfSong
Paul WolfSong is the artist behind WolfSong Leather Works in Dayton, Ohio.
CATHOLIC ARTIST CONNECTION: Where are you from originally, and what brought you to your current city?
PAUL WOLFSONG: I was born in Washington, DC, and lived on the coast until I was nine then my dad moved us to Dayton for his new job at Wright-Patterson AFB.
How do understand your vocation as a Catholic artist?
Do I understand my vocation as an artist? I’m very amused. To a degree yes, but not completely. As with so many things in my life and my relationship with God, I never completely understand. God does crazy, wild, and often mind-blowing stuff. However, He is always amazing (understatement) and never wrong and yes, indeed, I am definitely a Catholic artist and proudly claim that once (Do you have any idea how blessed and fortunate I am to be Catholic?!?!) I realized what God had made me (and that realization (discernment) took much time, pain, anguish, prayer, and absolute surrender. I also see it as living out my redemption. I don’t buy into the dangerous theory of “once saved, always saved.” Jesus doesn’t offer us a “free” gift; He gave His all and in turn requests and deserves ours. Accepting the gift of salvation costs us everything, by giving all of ourselves back to Him. As for my personal mission? It’s the mission we have undertaken as a family: to share our faith, to share the love, beauty, and truth of God, The Holy Family, and Holy Mother Church by creating things of beauty to help inspire, edify, and focus our prayer lives.
How can the Church be more welcoming to artists?
By remembering her roots, her glorious beauty and pageantry, and how for millennia, it was the artists, through many mediums, who shared and spread the Gospel messages, the lives of the saints and mystics, The Holy Family and our home, Heaven, with the world. Artists are evangelists, just a little different. Some of us more so lol.
How can the artistic world be more welcoming to artists of faith?
In this very atheistic, secular world in which we live that is a great question. It is a very hard go. I could produce and sell "dark art" all day long. I sometimes equate being Catholic/Christian to being an outlaw. I am what they call today “neurodivergent” (lol, no kidding!) and have lived my life pretty much as an “observing participant,” if that makes sense. I guess the art world, the world as a whole really could be more welcoming to those of faith, yet at the end of the day, not to be rude, I just no longer care. I’m going to do what I do and serve our Lord the best I can, welcomed or not. I would like to make many, many people happy but in the end, I really care about pleasing two people: God and my wife. I’ve been through too much, and God has done too much for me to do life any other way.
Where in your city do you regularly find spiritual fulfillment?
Queen of Martyrs is our home parish, a member of The Holy Spirit Family of Parishes. Our priests and our congregation, though very small, are kind, warm, generous, faithful and powerhouses of prayer. I also have a great love for Holy Family Parish, here in Dayton. They are shepherded by priests of the FSSP and are a TLM parish and it is absolutely glorious! I also find my greatest connection/fulfillment when I am in the forest, especially the mountain forests of the Appalachians.
What is your daily spiritual practice?
I wake up, very early, have coffee with God and then go about life. In my work, it is common to have incense burning, praying a Rosary, having an online Mass going, some Gregorian Chant, and other prayers going. Each one of my works is prayed over extensively in hopes that one day that work will find a good home and bring into that home and to all those that enter that home, all the blessings, graces, protection, and interventions of our Lord, our Holy Mother, and Saint Joseph, and so many other saints that we, as a family, have prayed and called upon. I don’t have a spiritual director—that is a good idea. I need one. Although I feel bad for anyone who has to deal with me. I have and continue to apologize to my guardian angel; man have I made his job hard. I can only imagine the reports he has had to give....sheesh!
What is your daily artistic practice?
Pick up your instrument(s)/tools every day. See, hear, feel, and “sense” what you are doing. You will be better today than yesterday. You will be better tomorrow than you are today. Pray and work. Scream, cry, throw the fit...and work. He didn’t give up...do not give up.
Anything else?
I thank God dearly, every single day for my wonderful wife Ann. She has been my greatest supporter and cheerleader and through her, God blesses us with a good home. Ann is a teacher at Our Lady of The Immaculate Conception school, here in Dayton. Otherwise, it is highly likely that I would be more than a “starving artist”; I would be a “homeless and dying” artist.