[citation needed] From early childhood, he developed his artistic interests and made his way to study at the School of Fine Arts in the neighboring Republic of Costa Rica in 1918–1919.
[citation needed] In 1920, Zelaya Sierra traveled to Madrid to study art at the Royal Academy of Fine arts of Saint Fernando, thanks to a scholarship from the Spanish Cooperation Agency in Honduras, thus becoming a disciple of Manuel Benedito and Daniel Vázquez Díaz, one of the major Spanish painters who also lived in Paris beside Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Joan Miró.
[citation needed] In Zelaya Sierra's proposal, there is a multiplicity of formal appropriations that range from the use of Renaissance Chiaroscuro to the concepts of the Spanish painting movement of the period, and then progress into cubism.
Zelaya Sierra assumed aesthetic conditions like gravitational core, finding no problems on focusing closely on the Honduran social reality of the times.
The painting marks his way of denouncing the harm and pain that a man inflicts upon his fellow men during a civil war.