Provenance: Private Collection, Makati City

ABOUT THE WORK

Anita Magsaysay Ho’s paintings would have at least a trio for a subject, for reasons of composition. Here there are two clusters of four and three people each, in the foreground and the background. The result is a fine balance of all pictorial elements. Anita Magsaysay Ho emphasized movement and bustling interaction, by means of bold and vigorous brushstrokes, and strong tonal contrasts of light and darkness, with greens and browns predominating the overall tone is earthy. The softly limned horizontal line defining the horizon creates a sufficient sense of distance that cuts through the near monochrome similarity of the sky from the earth. These colors bring to mind the countryside, o,r more properly, the soil from which bandanna-ed, working women eke out their humble livelihood. However, the artist does not inject stylistic elements unnecessary to her work. Her treatment of the jagged tree trunk adds to the conclusion that Anita Magsaysay Ho is not a cubist. She merely applies the lessons learned from the movement in the chiseled lighting of the elegant women. One visual philosophy Magsaysay Ho introduced into Philippine Painting had to do with the composition of the subject’s head and the inartistic top heavy coloring of the Filipino in real life. Also, the depiction of her rural women is idealistic and is tied up with the temper of her works. They are lean, with long regal necks, slit eyes and hairs wrapped in kerchiefs (she finds that black hair makes their figures “top heavy”) and possess radiant health, humor, and poise. Her women of the 1950s, especially those she painted in egg tempera, a medium she has mastered, are memorable for their elongated forms, angular gestures, and slick surface. Their slickness derives from an impeccably tidy brushwork and an elaborate technique of painting in layers and glazes whcih allow light to get through to the under painting. The women subjects themselves are generalized with no particularizing features, their figures stylized as they are in most of Magsaysay Ho’s other works. Anita’s main concern was not, of course, anatomical correctness but the overall formal completeness of the painting. Yet she was still working within certain established conventional norms — the distortion of the limbs, and the exaggeration of the hands to suggest the tedium of physical labor, something that she could have observed in the representations of peasant life. Yet it is of note that one of the dramatis personae breaks the canon of women wearing bandannas, letting her jet black hair flow down. This may be the artists’ attempt to highlight the personality of the model. Rosa Bonheur painted the horses she loved; Grandma Moses painted the scenes of her childhood. It is probably inevitable that Anita’s unique world should be peopled by her women. Yet another deviation from the Anita Magsaysay Ho canon is the presence of the man in the tree-lined background; yet the artist decides to show only the back. There is no hint whether it is the man who heads this group of fruit gatherers, since the artist herself is silent about the distribution of labor in her idyllic agrarian world. It is all about the Pleasure Principle in appreciating her art. Unlike Anita, these women are barefoot and of obviously humble origins. But the kinship is there — like Anita, of such a hieratic grace and dignity that they led a distinguished artist to exclaim to Leandro Locsin, Filipino architect and owner of several Ho paintings: “I could venerate these women; I should bow down and kiss their feet!” The female workers are not made into demigods or proletarian heroes, and as a result Anita Magsaysay-Ho has achieved an epic art of the ordinary, a rustic subject with its own innate grandeur in the way that the heroism of the days of old had been made to its own time