_Divine Grace/The Immaculate Conception_

Divine Grace/The Immaculate Conception
6' x 4.5'
Oil on cradled canvas
June 18 - 26, 2018

This is painting # 9 for Maryhill School of Theology.

In a Wikipedia entry, "Mary (Arabic: مريم‎, romanized: Maryam), the mother of Jesus (Isa), holds a singularly exalted place in Islam as the only woman named in the Quran, which refers to her seventy times and explicitly identifies her as the greatest of all women, stating, with reference to the angelic salutation during the annunciation, 'O Mary, God has chosen you, and purified you; He has chosen you above all the women of creation.'...

"According to the Quran, divine grace surrounded Mary from birth, and, as a young woman, she received a message from God through the archangel Gabriel that God had chosen her, purified her, and had preferred her above all 'the women of the worlds.' This event, according to the same narrative, was followed by the annunciation of a child who was to be miraculously conceived by her through the intervention of the divine spirit while she was still virgin, whose name would be Jesus and who would be the 'anointed one,' the Promised Messiah. As such, orthodox Islamic belief 'has upheld the tenet of the virgin birth of Jesus'... 

This painting depicts Mary as a Mindanao maiden (the Luzon Mary is at the entrance to the library while the Visayas Mary is inside the main section of the library), and was designed to hang at the top of the staircase leading to the library's second floor.

The auditory stimulus used during the execution of this painting is on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAAlDoAtV7Y. The auditory stimuli I use for paintings have nothing to do with the paintings' subject matter.