I began liking paintings when my mother introduced me to the world of Encyclopedias when I was young back then. You can definitely taste and lick the early 1990’s summer breeze when you know your family has an Encyclopedia collection — as it’s like the modern Internet nowadays — where you can collect numerous details and information, although they expire after 3-5 years, but nevertheless, you round your eyes whenever an image would come up in one particular page and you just cannot move on.

I always pick up Encyclopedia Volume 16 (stands for P), and it was Grolier’s, where I consummate most of the paintings the whole afternoon, reading and re-reading the artist’s thoughts, why they painted it, and often I would surmise how they even painted these not skinny but not that fat waistlines of the gods and goddesses. I familiarized myself somehow to some paintings that are very classical and of Greek mythology, but as I grew up, I began to also like abstract paintings and others, like Gustav Klimt, Picasso, to name a few.

Last December 2014, I went to Nueva Valencia, a part in Guimaras Island where there’s no “2G” and “3G” connection. I found this painting in one of the resort’s cucinas and I stared for more like 3-4 minutes. The horse and everything, including whatever it is inside that special place has connected me back to a certain room one afternoon, books scattered around the floor, FM radio playing pop songs over the air, and me reading small texts and/or characters as a footnote from the paintings that can be seen on the main page. Ideally, it was a time-travel moment for me.

And I don’t know still how I can move on from this painting.