St. Elias Chapel's stained glass legacy

    Relieved, Winfield announced his initial window would instead portray St. Teresa taking her vows. He proudly points to a picture of it in a portfolio of his work, a book which reveals Winfield’s artistry in an incredibly wide range of media, spanning over 60 years. He is not an artist in stained glass only. There is his work in repoussé (sheet metal hammered from both sides), including massive plaques and intricately tooled spirit boxes. There are paintings, sculptures, jewelry, mosaics, drawings, etchings, appliquéd tapestries and even quilts.

    Winfield did not set out to be an artist, however. Music was his first love and from his early teens he intended to become a composer, working at one time with ultra-modernist American classical composers Carl Ruggles and Charles Ives. He still turns to composing as a creative outlet.

    “Many artists will get into a dry spell,” he notes, “and they can’t paint or they can’t do things because they’ve used up their energy in their particular field. If I get tired of painting, I’ll go into doing silverwork or I’ll go into something else — or even write terrible music.” (One rather doubts any music the multi-talented Winfield creates would be classified as “terrible.”)

    Winfield studied at Cooper Union in New York City and minored in art, but came to the realization that music, as he puts it, “wasn’t just what I needed.” His schooling ended abruptly his senior year, however, with a near fatal case of pneumonia. Later, he would study under master engraver William Stanley Hayter at Atelier 17 and spend a wonderful year in Paris, but the route to Winfield’s career in stained glass and liturgical art took a few detours first.

    His early work was for his brother’s innovative jewelry-making business, which involved embedding artwork (made by hundreds of different artists, including Winfield) into the new medium of plastic. His brother being more artist than businessman, the business ran into financial difficulties and, in an effort to save it, the brothers moved out to the family summer home in the woods in what was to be a two-man operation. Winfield brought with him his new bride. A week later, his brother confessed the business was bankrupt and took off in the single car they had shared.

    “I walked a mile and a half to the nearest place that was hiring and it was the steel mill,” he recalls of his subsequent employment. Here he worked the 300-ton press for awhile and eventually got into doing company time studies, spending several years in this profession. He kept his hand in art, however, teaching it to children and his paintings began receiving one-man shows throughout the country. He was also involved in jewelry making, having taught himself repoussé, and developed special tools for this which he still uses.

    His brother opened an art gallery in St. Louis that displayed Winfield’s work and it was here that Emil Frei, Jr., second generation owner of the well-known Frei Company, admired his spiritual paintings, commenting that such an artist would do well in designing stained glass. Winfield had visited the company and been impressed during a family visit to St. Louis, so was thrilled to receive a telegram sent by his mother and brother. “Job waiting for you at Emil Frei’s,” it read. “Come quickly.”

    Winfield promptly quit his job, was sent off by the steel mill with a rousing farewell party and arrived at the Frei Company only to discover there was no job. The telegram had been a fabrication by his mother and brother to get him out of time studies and back into art, where they felt he belonged.

    In Missouri, he continued to exhibit at juried art shows and happened to encounter Frei at one of these. Frei inquired if he had found work yet and, on learning he had not, suggested he come out to his studio just to see if he would even like stained glass work.

    He was given a cutter to assist him and happily set to work designing a small stained glass plaque, which drew the attention of a young employee whose tedious job consisted solely of doing the borders for a large restoration project repairing the hail damaged windows of an old church. Resentful of the newcomer’s “having fun” on creative work, the worker quit, which allowed Winfield to move into a full-time job with the company.

    “So for a year and a half I did nothing but repair work,” he said. “And I learned the craft and I learned all the old techniques because I had to use them.” After that, he was given a couple of small design jobs. Then came the call from San Antonio for the windows for the National Shrine of the Little Flower (It would not be designated a basilica until 1998.) and the rest is San Antonio history.

    One of Winfield’s most famous works is the “Space Window” for the National Cathedral in Washington, commemorating man’s first steps on the moon and the exploration of space. Embedded in this window is a lunar rock donated by the crew of Apollo 11.

    He is also known for pioneering the use of three-dimensional stained glass in the 1950s. His use of three-dimensional stained glass panels, with identical designs repeated in five different-colored panels, transformed a musical concept into a physical art form titled “Theme and Variations” for the Sheldon Music Hall in St. Louis. The use of gold and silver paint applied onto the glass enabled the panels to “shine” at night as well, he points out, when the loss of daylight would have otherwise hidden their beauty.

    Another memorable project in stained glass was a hospital chapel window he modeled after the style of the 30-foot-tall windows of San Chapelle in Paris. The soaring originals there used 25 pieces of glass per square foot. Winfield’s scaled down, but highly detailed, version required 110 pieces per square foot, he recalls. His UNESCO wall plaque, with its intricate repoussé artwork affixed to massive wood panels, was recently hung in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral and depicts the brotherhood of man.

    Among his many talents, he is also an expert at sewing, though had workers under his direction for his large-scale design undertaking for a bank in Mt. Vernon, Ill., for which he designed five special quilts. He explains this is similar to an artist’s work in stained glass, in which he chooses the colors and makes the specifications, while specialized workers handle the actual cutting of the glass and apply the leading. “When you need help, you know how to get it,” he says. “That’s part of the creative process too.” He learned petit point in order to design pillows for an Episcopalian cathedral.

    Affiliated with the Emil Frei Company since the early ’50s, he also taught art for many years at Maryville College (now a university) in St. Louis and at one time was partner in a small corporation that produced small, sandblasted plaques and which was later bought out by Schaefer Pen. Technically retired (he has been an associate of the Emil Frei Company for over 20 years now), he continues to design for two churches a year.

    The body of his work remains his creations through the Frei Company, uplifting masterpieces which would be expected to stand the test of time. Such is not always the case, however, and Winfield relates that much of his art is being destroyed along with the old churches that housed them. The average age of a church in the United States, he says, is 40 years, due to the social movement of populations. What was formerly a Jewish neighborhood may take on an Hispanic or African-American tone as old residents move away and new ones come in who want different decorative elements in their places of worship.

    In some cases old churches are turned to other uses, and Winfield wistfully turns to a page in his portfolio showing the 15-foot enamel and gold tabernacle he designed for a Jewish synagogue, now torn down. The doors found a new use in a restaurant. “Some of them don’t get lost,” he says of his works. “They have certain value, but still they don’t function the way they should.” He adds, without bitterness, “That’s how life is for the creator.”

    His stained glass windows for the St. Elias Adoration Chapel include five scenes from the life of St. Elias (or St. Elijah) and are located high on the walls behind the altar, just above ground level in the basement chapel. Hand-blown glass, as are Winfield’s windows in the basilica upstairs, the chapel windows are more Gothic, he notes, though still realistic in style. “The Gothic idea of stained glass was the most beautiful in a sense,” he says, “because it was holding the pictures on the surface and making them a flat design.” With the Renaissance, he relates, came the pictorial windows, which were more like imitations of paintings, a style he partially used in his original windows for the basilica, since St. Teresa of Avila lived during the late Renaissance.

    His sixth window for the chapel area is a transom window over the outer entry door honoring Mary, titled “Stella Maris.” The tiny white stars that dot the blue sky surrounding her were created using a technique done only by Winfield, which he also used in his famous “Space Window.”

    While his visit to the basilica for the blessing of his chapel windows coincided with the installation of the final window, Winfield did not see his original windows upstairs until 12 years ago, when he “retired” and moved to Carmel, Calif. He decided to swing through San Antonio to see how his first project for the Frei Company had turned out and modestly admits he thought they were “pretty good.” He is delighted with the chapel windows as well.

    Currently, he is working on a project for a Catholic church in Little Rock, Ark., for whom he did work 30 years ago. “These are 6-foot rondels,” he says, pointing to circular windows in a picture in his portfolio. “And this is going to be an 8-foot rondel for the same church,” he adds, gesturing towards a depiction of the new window.     “So people call me back,” he says. “You know. As a functional artist.”