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But stained-glass artist Nick Parrendo usually serves a higher power.

For more than 50 years, he has rendered religious visions at Hunt Stained Glass Studios in the West End, where he and his eight employees design, install and restore stained-glass windows in area churches and synagogues, as well as private homes.

Parrendo began drawing as a boy and apprenticed at Hunt Studios under its original owner, George Hunt. He bought the business in 1987. His son, David, handles the business end, and his daughter, Celeste, also works as an artist at the studio.

Parrendo, 79, describes the process of creation as "putting the pencil down (on paper) until something develops."

"You have a blank space, you take a measurement and get some ideas, get them drawn and do some reading," he says.

Years spent taking holy orders has given Parrendo something of a priestly aspect himself. His brown eyes are expressive, his voice soft and almost consoling, his manner gentle. He worships at St. Cyril of Alexandria in Brighton Heights.

Tucked into a side street between the Monongahela River and the West End Circle, the studio is a warren of lofty rooms with wooden floors and racks of colored glass. It has the agreeably musty air of an antiques shop, crammed full of stained-glass windows, crucifixes and pews rescued or purchased from Catholic parishes that consolidated or closed.

On one worktable lie door-sized drawings of St. Conrad and St. Fidelis, a commission for St. Fidelis of Sigmaringen, a Catholic parish in Butler Township. In another part of the studio is a remarkably detailed sketch, rendered in colored pencil, of a stained-glass window of the four cardinal virtues and the Holy Family. It was commissioned by St. Mary Episcopal Church in Arlington, Va.

Last week, workers from Hunt Studios removed stained-glass windows at Beth Hamedrash Hagodol-Beth Jacob Synagogue in the lower Hill District.

The building will be demolished to make way for the new Penguins arena. Parrendo designed and installed the windows for the synagogue, which opened in 1963.

The windows will be crated and stored until the new synagogue opens in 2010 at 812 Forbes Ave., Uptown. The congregation will worship at temporary headquarters in the meantime.

"He's terrific," says Beth Hamedrash Rabbi Stanley Savage. "If Noah needed windows for his ark, Nick could have done it."

Parrendo submits sketches for customers' approval. The studio provides layout, patterns, cutting, painting, firing in a kiln at 1,200 degrees, glazing and installation.

Glazing, he says, is simply a fancy word for setting glass in its frame.

"Any time you set glass in its environment, it's glazing," he says.

In order to distribute the weight of the section, flat strips of galvanized steel are soldered perpendicular to the glass surface, he says.

One room on the second floor of the studio is crammed with books of Christian and Jewish iconography and symbolism. Various editions of the Bible jostle alongside books whose gilt-lettered spines say "Early Christian Symbols" and "Saints & Their Emblems."

Parrendo's father, Anthony, immigrated to this country from Italy.

"My father worked at the railroad," he says. "I just kept drawing from childhood."

When he was 12, he spent time at Children's Hospital, where he was treated for bleeding ulcers.

"I was drawing, and the nurse said, 'Gee, that's pretty good.'"

In 1946, his grandfather encouraged him to enlist in the Army so he could use the GI Bill to pay for art school. He began working at Hunt Studios in 1950.

The Rev. James Murphy, pastor at St. Fidelis Parish, says Parrendo's windows featuring St. Conrad and St. Fidelis will be part of a new addition to the church.

"We have a building committee that decides, but I recommended Nick because he's done work for me before," says Murphy, who served at another parish where Parrendo provided stained-glass windows.

Murphy praised Parrendo's use of color, his imagination and his spirituality.

"He has the whole package. He's got good workmanship, he's got good artistic ability," he says. "It's more than just drawing something. He brings out the meaning. It's more than just a painting or a drawing."

Not all of Parrendo's commissions are liturgical. One of his recent customers was a woman who surprised her husband, a golfer, with his likeness rendered by Parrendo in stained glass, complete with golf clubs and his red hair.

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