A true Filipino in her heart as well as in her art, Anita Magsaysay Ho is one of the greatest painters of our time.
This feature story was originally titled as In Praise of Anita, and was published in the May 2011 issue of Tatler Philippines
Mention Anita Magsaysay Ho and the name automatically brings to mind images of women with small triangular handkerchiefs, elongated necks and slits for eyes. The women who inhabit Anita’s canvases are busy at work: feeding the chickens, harvesting fruits, threshing or pounding rice in the farm, gathering shells by the seashore, cooking, sweeping, sewing in their own homes, or vending in the marketplace. These hardy peasant women surrounded Anita as a child spending summers in her native Zambales province.
“My life and, therefore, my paintings are so enriched by these vacations,” Anita said of those summers. She not only observed rural life, she took delight in actively participating in it. She went fishing with her mother along the mangroves, joined her brother, Mike, in pulling the nets of the fishermen, picked native fruits like mangoes and sineguelas, planted flowering shrubs, tried her hand in mending fishing nets, gathered chicken eggs and played with the children of the farm. She offered flowers in the Flores de Mayo festivals, joined Holy Week activities like the pabasa (continuous singing of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible that takes about 24 hours) and processions and delighted in going to the fiestas of neighbouring towns. A highly visual person even as a child, Anita observed such details as the gestures of women while they gossiped or the rise and fall of their hips and shoulders just as pestle rose and fell into the mortar. Not content with merely watching them, she tried her hand in pounding rice herself.
The advent of World War II put an end to those idyllic sojourns to Zambales, but memories of the simple provincial life remained with her for a lifetime. Well into her old age, she would always long to visit the town of her childhood time and again. “I was blessed with a happy childhood,” she acknowledges readily and this may very well be the reason why she repeatedly painted images from that childhood and why the women she painted are essentially happy women. Anita’s women are without angst and are not bothered by gender issues or concerned about being politically correct. They go about life content with who they are and what they do.
Anita’s sense of artistic integrity inspired her to paint what she knew well. She repeatedly says, “I can paint only what I experienced.” Her desire to experience more of life would take her to markets everywhere she lived. She found markets to be highly dynamic places with many interesting types of people. On a visit to the Quinta market of Quiapo, she got hit with a tomato when she was caught in the middle of a fight between two vendors. The mishap did not diminish her fascination for markets, and her body of works depicts a large number of market scenes. But even when the scenery has subtle tones of being in Hong Kong, with its plethora of baskets and bird cages, the women in them are always Filipinas. As to why she limits her subject to Filipinas, she declares, “I paint Filipino women because I know them well. That is why I never attempted to paint the Japanese, Brazilian, Canadian or Chinese women. I cannot presume to know them.”
