The thing about stained glass is that the artist doesn’t know how it will look until it’s installed.
“There’s an element of surprise along the whole process,” said Patrice Schelkun, who works in glass and also in paint.
When Schelkun works on stained glass, she pieces her windows together on a huge table and solders it tight, planning out every element, every color, every piece of glass. She must choose between clear or opalescent glass, and sometimes she adds more than one layer to create a sense of depth.
But it’s not until it’s completely done and held up to the light for the first time that she really knows how it came out.
Schelkun likes to add texture and detail to her glass pieces with paint, and this, too, yields unpredictable results. The paint, which is made of pigment mixed with finely ground glass, is applied with oil or water and fused to the glass surface in a kiln, eight hours at a time. Sometimes five or more layers of paint are applied, and fired in between each application. Sometimes the paint changes, and sometimes the color of the glass shifts in the kiln.
Or sometimes a piece turns out as designed, but then it’s not displayed for greatest effect. This was the case with “Adorned,” a panel with a sun-dappled face peering out from a crush of jewel-toned chrysanthemums. The piece was designed to be hung in direct light, but it was displayed too high up in an exhibit in Chicago, and the light didn’t shine through as Schelkun intended. When she retrieved that piece, she opted to install it on a light box, to display it at its best.
But sometimes this variability inherent in glasswork is an asset. Natural light, in particular, brings out the potential of glass to shift in appearance.
“It’s almost like the window is alive,” Schelkun said. “It’s the same thing if you’re walking by a window. It changes as you walk past it. It projects colors onto the floor. It’s kind of a living thing.”
From a bedroom mural to fine art
Schelkun, 65, now concentrates more on oil painting and portraiture than she does on glass, but she wasn’t always an artist of any kind. She studied science but soon put that aside to raise her children. The family bought a house in Pennsylvania in the ’90s, and Schelkun got to work decorating it. She began in her oldest daughter’s room, which she festooned with a mural of flowers and bunnies, turning it into a little secret garden.
Friends who saw her work said she was good, good enough to start a business. She began decorating homes, and then businesses, and then a church.
A church bathroom, that is. The pastor gave her free rein to redo the ugly little room in the vestibule.
“I did a stone wall and a little niche, and he was like, ‘Whoa,'” Schelkun said. She was welcomed onto the committee for the parish’s building project and worked on choosing colors and furnishings.
At the same time, she started to study drawing and painting in earnest, taking private classes with artists when she could spare the time. She also took a class on stained glass at a local community college.
“I knew nothing about stained glass. Basically [the class] was teaching you how to cut glass and piece it together, and I said, ‘No, I want to paint on glass,'” she said. “My first love was painting.”
But there is something about glass, and its potential to capture, transmit and refract light in different ways. Her studio, Immanence Fine Art, shows works in both paint and stained glass. What they all have in common is an emphasis on light.
“Immanence is evidence of the divine throughout the material world. We can interact with God’s presence through the beautiful things we see in nature, and the way light strikes things. That’s evidence of God, to me,” Schelkun said.
When she paints portraits, she often composes them with strong lighting from one side, but even more often with “rim light,” light that bleeds out from behind the subject.
“If someone is standing in front of a sunset, the light halos around their head,” she said. “It’s the light I’m attracted to.”
Reaching, and reflecting, different people
She has seen firsthand how the light can attract other people, too.
She recalls when she was commissioned to make a 4-foot round window of the Lamb of God for a chapel in her own parish church, St. Vincent de Paul in Richboro, Pennsylvania. It is painted lavishly and pieced together with variegated glass in vibrant primary colors. Around the outside is lettered, “Happy are those who are called to his supper.”
“That’s what it’s all about. That window said it all,” one man told her with tears in his eyes.
Schelkun said this is what she works for: “Not being the world’s greatest artist or to be in museums or famous, but touching the lives of individuals.”
She went on to design and paint a series of 17 stained glass windows for the church’s new chapel. That work led to other church commissions, and then a priest in a mostly Black parish in North Philadelphia reached out.
“Every image in our church is a white dude,” he told her. “I would like to have something that represents the people in my parish.”
So she worked with the pastor and the parishioners and came up with two large painted murals.
One is of the Our Lady of Kibeho in Rwanda, and one is of Mary surrounded by 12 holy men and women, including Katharine Drexel, Charles Lwanga, Augustine, Pierre Toussaint and Kateri Tekakwitha.
Schelkun said she painted Jesus preaching at the Sea of Galilee, and all the people listening to him were modeled by actual parishioners, many of them wearing traditional clothing from African countries.
Learning as she goes
But her artistic career as a self-described member of the “old white folk” community hasn’t been without its bumps. Like glass, the artist must be open to some changeability. Schelkun recalled another project, done in conjunction with the Independence Mission Schools, an organization that strives to transform Philadelphia communities by establishing Catholic grade schools in low-income areas.
The building in question had a huge, blank barrel vault ceiling divided into eight sections near the entryway, and the principal asked if there was something she could do to make the school look more Catholic. She was willing, but uncertain about working high on scaffolding for six weeks or more to complete the huge painting project.
So she came up with a plan. In her studio, she made eight individual quarter-scaled paintings, four angels and four saints, and then took them to a printer with a large flat-bed scanner. The paintings were scaled up and installed in situ, and they fit perfectly.
But logistics were not the only obstacle that had to be overcome. One of the saints Schelkun depicted was Peter Claver, a Jesuit missionary who ministered to enslaved people as they arrived in Cartagena, Columbia. Without realizing how a Black audience would perceive it, Schelkun painted the white saint standing next to a kneeling, shirtless African in shackles. The principal who had arranged for the murals was on vacation when the pieces were installed, and when he came back, Schelkun said, he was appalled at the inequality Schelkun had unintentionally implied.
So she repainted that panel. The piece now shows Peter Claver side by side with a young Black man who is on his feet and fully clothed.
“They’re more standing as equals,” Schelkun said. Lesson learned.
Schelkun also painted a widely circulated image of Servant of God Augustus Tolton. Surrounded by white birds in flight, he looks directly at the viewer. His hand is raised to heaven, pointing to God, and on his wrists are broken shackles.
“It’s breaking the chains of slavery and also of sin,” Schelkun said.
The image was blessed by Archbishop Charles Chaput and sent to every church in the National Black Catholic Congress to promote Tolton’s cause for sainthood.
Art that shares the Gospel
Schelkun, who now has 12 grandchildren, divides her time between New Jersey and Naples, Florida, where she is a parishioner at St. Peter the Apostle Parish, whose congregation includes many different populations.
Schelkun sings in the choir and cantors, and as she does, she looks to the back of the church, which features an interior stained glass window of Jesus and the Last Supper. The window is beautiful, Shelkun said, and its light is transmitted through the narthex.
“But the rest of this big long wall is blank,” she said.
She dreams of enlivening it with a mural of the communion of saints — both in heaven and on earth — approaching a heavenly Jerusalem.
“When people exit the church, they would feel like they are part of this commission to go out into the world and spread the Gospel,” she said.
Two of her works doing just that — paintings titled “Sustenance” and “Let My Prayer Rise Like Incense” — were chosen for “Do This in Memory of Me,” the sacred art exhibit organized in conjunction with the National Eucharistic Revival.
“If God is using me to touch other people’s hearts, that’s what’s important to me,” Schelkun said.
