CROWN HEIGHTS — When Erin K. McAtee lifts her brush to the canvas to paint, she considers it an act of prayer.
“I love getting to create and just be a vessel and use the gifts that God has given me as a painter. This heart that God has given me also enables me to contemplate him,” said McAtee, a Catholic visual artist and co-founder of Arthouse2B, an artists’ collective in Manhattan.
In the summer of 2023, McAtee, who lives on the Upper West Side and attends Mass at St. Vincent Ferrer Church on the East Side, took her artistic talents in another direction.
She teamed up with Veronica Marrinan, a friend she knew through Catholic art circles, to design a scarf for Litany NYC, a faith-inspired fashion line Marrinan co-founded in 2020.
After spending a year working in collaboration with McAtee, Marrinan, who operates her company out of her Crown Heights apartment, put the scarf, called Adoro Te (Latin for “I Love You Devoutly”), on sale on Litany’s website in August. Marrinan said the sales have been “pretty good” considering that the scarf has been on sale for less than two months.
The scarf was inspired by “Adoro Te Devote,” a prayer by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century in praise of Jesus and asking the Lord to heal him with his blood, “one drop of which can heal the entire world of its sins.”
In the prayer, St. Thomas Aquinas refers to Jesus as a “loving pelican.” That inspired McAtee and Marrinan to incorporate the image of a pelican into their design.
The design process for the Adoro Te scarf was a bit different for Marrinan, the lead designer on the dresses, blouses, scarves, and other clothing items in the Litany NYC catalog.
Typically, Marrinan’s first step is to come up with a concept. Marrinan, who attends Mass at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village, is inspired by many things — saints, Scripture passages, nature, and artworks.
Once she has a concept in mind, Marrinan gets her sketchbook and starts drawing. After she finishes a preliminary design, it undergoes a rigorous editing process.
“I’ll do an edit with either the person I’m collaborating with or the Litany team. We talk about things like what’s working well and whether we like the color,” she explained.
Next, they’ll have the factory they work with create a prototype, which takes about two weeks, Marrinan said. When the prototype is complete, the factory will return it to her for examination and testing.
“We like to have it in our hands. We’ll wear it a bit and ask our friends about it before we feel comfortable enough to offer it for sale on our site.” Marrinan explained.
The concept for the Adoro Te scarf was born in the summer of 2023.
“Veronica and I came together and realized that we had this shared experience in prayer and our life experiences at the time,” McAtee recalled.
She recalls sharing an image of a pelican — which became a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice and selflessness in the Middle Ages — that she loved to pray with.
“There is this legend where if a pelican mother can’t find food for its babies, it will pierce its own breast so that blood will come from the breast to feed the babies,” she said.
The two women bounced ideas back and forth from those conversations over the next year. Marrinan would share readings with McAtee, and McAtee would come back with some sketches, and the two would discuss color concepts.
Marrinan would take pictures of McAtee’s work and use photo editing software to change the colors and add new iterations. Eventually, they settled on a scarf design and sent the photos to the factory to create a sample, which they were both pleased with.
Both women said the creation of the Adoro Te scarf has brought them closer to their Catholic faith, and they look forward to collaborating again.
“I would love to create more scarves,” McAtee said. “I don’t know how or when or what that will look like, but I think my work right now lends itself to clothing or to fashion in some way. I’m very content with whatever God wants to do with my work.”