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The Work of Our Hands: The Music of the Spheres

Steve Wilson

Steve Wilson (SW) is a stained-glass artist working in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Sally Ann McKinsey (SAM) is the editor of Call to Worship.

All images from Creation, Chapel of St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church, New Orleans, Louisiana, Steve Wilson Glass

SAM: Thank you so much for sitting down with me and for sharing your work with the journal. Can you tell us a bit about the context for the project at St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church in New Orleans? 

SW: Thank you. The pastor and the donors were on a search to find someone to do the stained glass in their chapel and columbarium. The imagery is Louisiana centric, celebrating creation using Louisiana’s flora and fauna. 

SAM: The windows are beautiful. How did you get started in stained glass? What is your history with the material? 

SW: I went to graduate school at Louisiana State University (LSU), and most graduates of the stained-glass program there major more in full-bodied color than in the narrative. Now, the narrative is important too, but Paul Dufour, the faculty who taught us and developed a master’s degree program in the fine arts department, studied under Joseph Albers at Yale, who was strong in color theory and the Bauhaus. A lot of our projects in school were Bauhaus-oriented, problem-solution focused. Paul was old-school and rigorous, and I liked that. My first degree was in landscape architecture, and I had to take some art electives and found out that you had to have so many hours of design and color theory under your belt before you could get into Paul’s stained-glass classes. Design was really good training. 

I had a couple of teaching jobs when I got out of school. While applying to universities for teaching positions, I was active in the Arts Council.Looking in the paper for jobs, I saw a posting for an art teacher at our state school for the deaf. So I went there and interviewed. At that point I was very frustrated in the job search process, but I really believe that God had put in my heart to do art. I always intended to glorify God through it. So I got back from the interview and I got on my knees and prayed, “Okay, Lord, what’s going on? I need to make a living.” The phone rang, and it was Derek Gordon, who was our director at the Arts Council. And he said, “How would you like a job at the School for the Deaf through the National Endowment for the Arts? We will sponsor you as artist-in-residence for two years, and you’ll get a teacher’s salary but work with students and teachers half your day on art-related projects. For the other half of the day, we will fund a studio space and materials for you to pursue your own goals as an artist. And I just went, “Wow!” It was like an answer to prayer. And so I did, and during the time I started cold-calling all the architects across the South that do liturgical designs, asking for referrals, and asking for them to look at my portfolio. I just hit it hard for about five to ten years while producing glass, and it’s been up and down, but it’s been great. I find that all my clients are just wonderful people, churches, residences, or public commissions. 

SAM: I love hearing about the influence of the Bauhaus and Josef Albers, your use of color, and your design perspective. I’ve read your talk about the liturgy of light, and I wonder if you would be able to reflect on how you think color and light function in the context of worship.

SW: Yes. In school we studied Abbot Suger at St. Denis in northern Paris, the first Gothic ideal church. Suger wrote about why you bring stained glass into the sanctuary and why you use more ascending windows as opposed to Romanesque windows, which were smaller. The Gothic style used larger windows and stained glass to bring light into the worship space, to bring the cosmos into the worship space. Suger talked about the colors sapphire and ruby and emerald and about how those colors were elements in the cosmos, pinnacles of beauty when it comes to transparency, color, and light. I was really inspired by that. He was reading Dionysius the Areopagite, who converted to Christianity by Paul’s sermon at the Areopagus, Mars Hill (Acts 17:34), though it is now understood that he was actually reading later writings that were attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. I started reading these writings on light as spirit and spirit as light, which was part of Suger’s inspiration for making the stained-glass windows bigger and lighter. And of course, St. Denis was the king’s church, so the king endowed Abbot Suger with all the money he needed to knock it out of the park with sculpture and stained glass and architecture. I took Gothic, Byzantine, and Romanesque art history and had a wonderful teacher at LSU, Marchita Mauck. She studied liturgical design at Notre Dame, wrote a small book on building a house for God, and became a liturgical space consultant. Some really large congregations around Louisiana and in Houston consulted with her. We’ve done about fifty-five churches in Houston, and Marchita was instrumental in recommending me to these churches to do their stained glass. She was a great resource and really inspiring for me in my work.

SAM: Your influences are so interesting to place in conversation, from Suger to the Bauhaus to scholars like Marchita Mauck. I appreciate the way you are working within a very particular artistic tradition in terms of the context and material and bringing new influences into that process. How do you hope that the windows will impact the life of the congregation and their worship? 

SW: I believe one thing we have enough of are windows with decorated saints in them. Do you know what I mean? The saint could be anyone, and the only way you know who the saint is supposed to be is because of a symbol or thing that he’s holding. I’ve seen gorgeous old windows done by Jacoby, Frei, and Tiffany—all the mainline old studios. They’re gorgeous, but they’re often repeated. All over Europe, too, the windows are really decorative—the person in the window with all the bordering devices, the rich fabric, and painted faces. They’re gorgeous, but we didn’t dare do that in my program at LSU. Paul would have killed us! Let the glass and the lead tell the story. Keep the paint for the canvas. So ours is a contemporary style, but, nonetheless, controlling of the color and the value of color. The value is so important in a stained-glass window. I’ve seen so many instances where there might be an eastern exposure window behind the pulpit in the morning, and in the morning the stained glass might be too bright, so that people get eyestrain looking at the silhouette of a pastor. In the event that exposure is there, I always tell the client that we need to go extremely low in value, using blues, blue purples, blue greens, colors that have darker value, so that your eye can relax while looking. In graduate school, after we had finished a design, Dufour used to get us to take it to Kinko’s and get a black and white print of it so that we could see the values. And he said, “Now, think of this window as a light filter. Where do you want the highest values and the lowest values? How are you going to mix them?” So in my windows next to architecture or a wall that is blocking the light, I usually start with a lower value color adjacent to the wall and then move toward a higher value for the center or as it goes up.

This is not always the case, because, you know, there are all kinds of circumstances where you might do something differently. But for instance, one of our new jobs is the Our Lady of Lourdes Women and Children’s Hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana. They are part of the Franciscans, and the Franciscan nuns are hospital nuns. Of course, their patron is St. Francis. The chapel is a really nice building that a local architect designed, and it has about a four-foot-tall clerestory window going around the whole building just under the roof, an old invention to lift the roof off of the space to make it feel lighter and to let light come in. There are eleven windows that are each three feet wide by twelve feet tall, but they go up and touch the clerestory. So we are going full bodied in value and color on the bottoms of these windows, rising up to clear glass, probably textured clear, before it hits the clerestory. So when you look around the room, the stained glass will reflect what the architect was doing in the space. They wanted the Canticle of the Sun in the windows, but since there are eleven windows, the Canticle of the Sun is a bit limited. So I suggested that the Canticle of the Sun is really about St. Francis’s praise of creation, of God’s beauty and grace, so let’s do the seven days of creation, the three persons of the Trinity, and Mary in one of them. They liked the idea, but because it’s a women’s and children’s hospital, they want Mary to be pregnant Mary, Our Lady of Hope. I’m really excited about it because I’m working with the architecture to create a light statement from low values at the bottom to high values at the top. And again, they wanted Louisiana-centric flora and fauna, with all of the bottoms of the windows rising up to the creatures. 

SAM: That sounds so exciting. This illustrates how contextual each of your projects is, since you are working with the architecture, the community, and the natural environment of Louisiana as content. And add the layers of your formal influences on the design. Again, I see the influence of Albers and ideas of transparent color and value. 

SW: You ask how I might hope that these windows would inspire worship. Instead of more and more traditional figures, I like to focus on the movement created by the whole. Hopefully, in the way I design them, you see movement and animation in the windows. Even though it’s lead and glass, and it doesn’t move, there’s a sort of action, the mood flowing through all of those windows. Circles are a constant theme in my work—I use lots of circles, perfect circles. Some get broken and interrupted with other forms, but if you look in those windows, you will see movement in circles. One of my favorite hymns is “This Is My Father’s World,” and it has influenced my design: “Nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres.” The other hymn I use in my artist statement a lot is “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” the line “Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by thy help I’m come.” Often the titles of my work, especially pen-and-inks, will be “Ebenezer,” colon, and then another bit of title.

SAM: There’s a lot of movement in your work. It doesn’t look like it stands still to me but moves the eye in circles or spirals. I very much appreciate this conversation and your work. Thank you for the opportunity to meet you and speak with you. Your perspective is a gift to the journal. 

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