In the last few months I've been working on my own Annunciation scene. For anyone unfamiliar, the Annunciation is the scene in the Bible in which the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the son of God. I've a book filled with nothing but Annunciation scenes, from my mother.

The tone and symbols of the various paintings are fairly consistent, considering that they range 16 centuries. Mary is usually praying or studying scripture in her home or garden when she is surprised by an angel of God bearing news of her pregnancy, and usually various sexual symbols are scattered around the painting. Behind Mary, a bed, a male angel entering the door of her home or the gate of her garden, a lily in hand or in a vase, and sometimes a ray of light pouring through a window toward her womb. Meanwhile, as Gabe drops the bomb, Mary is sometimes mildly shocked looking, but more often, morosely calm, her fingers still marking her page as she glances momentarily at the interruption.

In nearly all, the painting depicts a setting contemporary to the artist; an attractive European woman dressed in the humblest of European fashion surrounded by rich draperies in a lavish room, despite the subject matter of a young Jewish peasant girl. The most notable exceptions to the indulgent anachronisms are the versions by both James Tissot and Henry Ossawa Tanner.

As an attempt of my own, contemporary Annunciation, I'm working with spray paint on birch plywood. Irony is not the intent, of course, as a non-Christian. I think that the subject matter of religion is important, no matter how much one abstains from it in ones personal life.