IN June 2004 from his studio in Tacloban, de Veyra wrote the following notes about the above piece as an unsent letter to his wife in Bulacan:

    “Dear ‘Cile.

    “I wish I had the money now to be able to frame this other pastel work (very small one) that I also finished late May (or was it early June?). Initially I titled it Night Swimming, because it’s a portrait of a mother (with another woman) with a baby and a bag, and this mother is posing in front of a large portal or arch behind which is a moonlit bay. The portal or arch’s image is culled from the Barasoain Church’s, which I turned into a mysterious or surrealist arch right beside a beach. The entire composition is copied from a fragment of a photo in front of the aforementioned church, and the mother in the painting is you carrying (our son) Gabo in your arms, my sister Ada behind you.
    “I was attracted to the photo fragment for two reasons.

    “One, the blackness behind the mother in the photo, with which I’d be able to say what I need to racially say about our mothers’ black hair, simply by having this latter blackness meld into the blackness beyond the archway; same with the baby’s hair, Gabo’s black hair.

    “Two, since this was painted after a photo fragment, my zooming-in on that part of the photo painter’s on my computer monitor resulted in an Impressionist effect that I liked. This then became not so much a portrait of you and Gabo and my sister Ada in front of a portal to a sea in the background, as now just a portrait of any similarly-looking tourist trio. While it is a personal painting, it doubles as a public composition, a resulting comment by me on portraits of people the public may not care much about.
    “One thing else, I liked the Virgin Mary effect the arch had on the mother’s image in the center, creating a grotto-like composition, shattered only by another figure’s presence (my sister Ada’s) coming out of that grotto ‘cave’. Is this a Marian mother-and-child piece, too? The color of the baby bag hanging from the mother’s shoulder, and the color that I used for the arch to complement the mother’s blue, does emulate the official assignation of the light cobalt or cerulean blue color on the Virgin Mary. Thus, perhaps, this is more useful as a piece referencing the Catholic context than any other Christian one.
    “So, should I have titled this Birhen (Virgin)? That would have been too ambitious, the composition’s sum being vague about that direction. Port/Portal is more like it, or Hemingway’s La Mar, referencing Hemingway’s simile involving woman and sea in The Old Man and the Sea. With this final title decided, my piece now pointed to a kind of arrival, whilst the darkness of death and the limitless sea and night behind was acknowledged as women and a baby came forth from it to foreground a future of life.

    “Jojo”.