Looking back, I believe that my first, live exposure to classical painting was in our ancestral house in San Fernando, Pampanga. I must have been seven. One of my aunts brought home a pair of life-size, cut-out angels for a school presentation. Each angel had a strap that could be tied round one's waist, so that when walking (presumably onstage) it would appear that one's guardian angel were behind him. The angels were done in the style of Bouguereau. I was so awed by them that I was sorry they had to leave the house and brought to the school. I remember swearing to myself, though, that, someday, I would paint as realistically as those angels were painted.