On my way to work one Monday morning around February, I found a piece of plywood by the side of the road, abandoned and spotless. I picked it up and brought it home, where it lay ignored for some time, since I was still busy working on other projects. However, the panel was never far away from my mind, and I was always playing around with concepts in my head on what I would paint for my first "official" painting. I started work on the panel first week of March and put down the final brushstroke March 31st.
The painting is deeply personal and symbolic for me. While the two women in the painting are not really what my two sisters Isabela and Cristina look like in real life, the other elements within the painting are from when I was growing up in the sleepy town of Albay. We had a garden, where roses grew wild and snails roamed at their own leisurely pace. For a time, we kept a barn owl as a pet, till it bit my finger and we had to set it free. The volcanoes in the background represent the magnificent Mt. Mayon, and while in reality, there is only one volcano, in my painting I kept two for the theme of sisterhood and duality.
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