IN July 2004 from his studio in Tacloban, de Veyra wrote the following notes about the above piece as an unsent letter to his then eight-year-old son Miguel in Bulacan:

    “Hello again, Miguel.

    “I only just now got to sit down on my writing desk here to write about this pastel painting that I finished last week on my drawing desk. I am writing a screenplay-novel, you see, the reason why I can’t spend more time on my art pieces for you.
    “Anyway, this is a continuation of my experiments with the photo image turned into a line drawing. This one, featuring a photo image of your Mama in the early ‘90s in front of a window, beside two umbrellas hanging from the window’s ledge and facing aslant a wall, has been printed on pastel paper, thus the striped pattern effect. I was already enamored with the mechanical imprint, but thought of a way by which I could provide a sort of counter to it using soft pastel. Then I saw this photograph of your Mama with a shirt bearing an I Ching hexagram and thought that here were the context-ridden stripes I was looking for.
    “Then, given the angelic look on your Mama’s face in that photo, I thought I’d soften the whole thing not just tone-wise and texture-wise (graphite could have done it) but also color-wise. So there was no better choice than pastels, as anyway this was pastel paper I printed the photo-image-turned-line-drawing on.
    “The result? A Picasso-esque (pre-Cubist Picasso) cum Chagallian piece with Oriental allusions. All a miraculous outcome of a simple objective of letting the impersonal printer roller’s marks fight with the soft pastel chalks’ more personal caresses.

    “Papa”.