Portrait of the artist.

WHEN DUTCH-BORN ARTIST SYLVIA NICOLAS WAS working on a mosaic at a Benedictine abbey in New England more than 40 years ago, the monks insisted she finish and clean up so they could begin Holy Thursday services. "But the church isn't ready yet," she protested, "and there are four tons of stone to move."

The monks, who wanted to try out their new liturgical space, were adamant. But so was Nicolas.

As the monastic community processed out to start the Mass, they saw a shadow move in the Blessed Sacrament chapel and heard the determined scrape of a trowel, the resolute pounding of stone. Nicolas was not about to be dislodged.

One of the leading ecclesiastical artists in the United States, Nicolas is a woman of firm opinion, steely resolve, deep iconographic and theological knowledge, and generous good humor. With the genteel reserve of a museum doyenne, she can still tell a raucous good story. The daughter of Joep and Suzanne (Nys) Nicolas, both famous artists who immigrated to the U.S. in 1939 to escape the rising tide of Nazism, Sylvia has been wife, mother, grandmother, and--always--artist.

From her rambling studio barn in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, Nicolas' artistic connections stretch around the world with commissions for statuary, stained glass, and mosaics for monasteries, churches, hospitals, government buildings, and public spaces.

While the works she creates help others to pray, she finds that for her, the work itself is prayer. "I'm terrible at concentrating on prayer as such; I'm not fluent in prayer," she says. "But for five generations, my family has been working in the arts for the church, so this has become a way of life. The work has become my prayer."

Whenever Nicolas accepts a commission, she delves deeply into the history of the person she will depict. Her favorite figures? "The Virgin, of course, and I have to admit, I developed something of a passion for [St.] Anselm," she says.

As an artist educated in New York, Paris, Rome, and her father's studio in Venlo, the Netherlands, however, she finds the clay, glass, and stone of her creations are themselves the essential teachers.

"One is always in a dialogue with the material, with what you're doing to it and with the person you are trying to depict. Of course, I have a general idea of what I am doing. But it is the happy accidents, the features of the substance that help suggest the final form," she says.

She readily battles with her clients--whether abbot, liturgist, monsignor, or lay committee member--to help bring them to a fuller vision of the possibilities of the art they have commissioned. But, she says, the decline in religious and theological knowledge, even of the sacred symbols of Christianity, is distressing, especially when it occurs among the clergy.

"You can't tell them they're wrong. You have to lead them to see differently. Iconography fascinates me, and it is exceedingly important to employ the poetic in art."

Nicolas says she agrees with a Dutch cardinal who once told her that stained glass served historically as a biblia pauperum, a scripture for the poor and illiterate who saw the great stories of salvation play out as images in a window. Now, she adds, religious illiteracy is so pervasive that she hopes stained glass creations stimulate people to explore the religious heritage of the church.

Often, she says, periods of "no taste" have bedeviled the Catholic Church. "You have to go back to the early periods, when artists would depict the life of Christ and Mary from a total sense of belief, spontaneously and without deep cerebral thoughts that give us sentimentality."

"ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH is that it permits, even encourages, a certain amount of irreverence. Priests and monks and the rest of us ought to be able to laugh at ourselves," she says. In her St. Anselm mosaics, a monkey in a tree depicts a liturgist who "terrorized" everybody else, but to whom she became quite close once she dismissed his critique with the observation, "Everyone knows monks have terribly bad taste."

JEROME JOSEPH DAY, O.S.B., a pastor and professor of English at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.

SYLVIA NICOLAS ARTIST, MONT VERNON, NEW HAMPSHIRE

FUN FACT: I have seen almost every movie from the inception of film until the 1950s.

MY PET PEEVE: Committees.

FAVORITE TV SHOWS: The Weather Channel and the news. I can't watch all that stuff with dyed-blonde bimbos and their buddies killing each other all the time.

A PRIZED POSSESSION: A photo of my father's assistant, now in her 90s, with the piano where she hid some Jewish boys from the Gestapo during World War II.