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Works like Tahip reveal why Anita Magsaysay-Ho is the top woman artist in the Philippines. What is it about the working women of Anita Magsaysay-Ho, who are neither saccharine on one hand nor gritty on the other, but seem to be lost in their own sphere of calm amid the toil? Here, the colors glow, in a palette of earthy tones — black, brown, ochre, off-white. Welcome to Anita’s world of grace. At the beginning of her artistic career, Magsaysay-Ho decided on the peasant woman as the central image in her paintings. The figures are brown as the soil, sturdy, big boned, and at work. The artist has been faithful to this icon through the decades. Leonor Orosa Goquinco once wrote about the hinted duality of Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s woman or women: “Set firm on the ground, strong and serene, Magsaysay-Ho’s female figure is projected from the painter’s poetic inner eye in a pose of arrested motion — motion-stilled in timelessness, their lean lines offset the soft curves of a basket; they are shy, diffident, modest, brown, Philippine and Oriental; they are enigmatic as only the artist can depict". Tahip is remarkable for its spontaneity of execution. The working women seem to emerge from the shadows, lit by their brilliant white bandanas and blouses are a counterfoil to the earthy colored “bilaos” raised or lowered in the action of winnowing grain. At all events as subjects, Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s world is peopled by women engaged in activity, busily occupied — usually in an everyday but romanticized chore. Explains Magsaysay-Ho simply, “I just love to paint women, I feel I know them; I can paint them over and over again. To paint men I would have to have models; women, I draw from memory. “Tahip” is a graceful action painting given all the movement from right to left. Close examination of the figures show that the composition is based on only one figure multiplied 5 times. These figures carry the same characteristics, slit-eyed and bandana-wrapped heads. Unlike some of his earlier pictures in the 1940s, this picture is more like a group portrait in formal style of women at work as much as a study of the work being carried on. Magsaysay-Ho also developed a warm, dark earthy palette and a more stage-like presentation of figures dispersed within a well-defined space. The painting is characterized by the abandonment of strong intense colors, and the predominance of dark earthy colors, a softening of form and the implied rediscovery of flesh, a fact remarked on by Contemporary critics. The painting shows a certain spatial stillness in the handling of the paint in some areas, especially on expansively dark background. The women reveal another side to the artist’s provincial expression by their awkward vitality and tendencies toward exaggeration and angularity. The artist’s main concern was not, of course, anatomical correctness but the overall formal completeness of the painting. With the development of her expressive powers came a corresponding study of technical processes. There is also a decreasing naturalism, a heightening of distortion and tension. The nuanced disproportions were not spontaneous but the result of calculated pictorial decisions. Even more than these formal parallels, the innate human dignity with which poverty and physical misfortune are not depicted may be counted as one of Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s most magnanimous traits as a painter. Thus Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s expressive distortions of form and space make her an important precursor of modern Philippine art,, Anita Magsaysay-Ho never painted her rural females singularly: We are used to how she paints her women in groups or in multiples of 3s. She created them all in the imagery of her mind and gave them an Eden to tend. The overall tone is festive. Pamela M. Alexander wrote in a 1979 magazine article entitled “Philippine Artistic Genius”: “The artist’s idealization of women depends on certain stylistically decorative elements which bestow a poetic temperament on her works. The appeal is heightened by the simplicity of her folk themes". The writer adds: “Mood emerges from elements of color, texture, and rhythm". In the 1950s, art watchers became aware of Magsaysay-Ho’s charming style. However, she was not the only artist interested in depicting such themes based on the workaday activities of common folk. Other early Filipino Neorealists were Vicente Manansala and Romeo Tabuena. They were painting women vendors and such types, of which group Magsaysay-Ho was a marginal member. Her women of the 1950s, especially those she painted in egg tempera, a medium where she reigned supreme, are memorable for their elongated silhouettes, angular gestures, and slick surface. By the time Tahip was painted she had already abandoned her use of egg tempera and loosened up on her figurative drawing. But the charming mannequin peasants basically remained unchanged. Their elan derives from an impeccably tidy brushwork and an elaborate technique of painting in layers and glazes, which allows light to enter through the underpainting. Anita Magsaysay-Ho is not a Cubist. She merely applies the lessons learned from the movement. Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s insistence in the expressive function of the pictorial elements may explain the reasons for her insistence on a certain indigenous version of “Mannerism” and the resultant and figural distortions. These techniques suggested formalist tendency, but that’s what it all was: a suggestion. She held a distrust for formalism. The depiction of her rural women is idealistic and is tied up with the temper of her works. Leonor Orosa Goquinco wrote in a 1975 article entitled “Anita’s World of Women”: “Rosa Bonheur painted the horses she loved, Grandma Moses, the scenes of her childhood. It is probably inevitable that Anita’s unique world should be people by her women". Eric Torres writes: “The overall effect is unfailingly stylish, enhancing the impression that her subjects are really patrician ladies of Chinese descent disguised as peasants in stiffly quaint, mannequin poses and postures, with hardly a wrinkle or hint of sweat on them". Tahip shows the first signs of what was to develop into her very own indigenous Mannerism, for the flattening tendency (because of the use of non-atmospheric color) and the interest in gestural details. Tahip is also archetypal of her later style wherein her women were to become more ethereal, the forms more elongated, more graceful, and more delicate.