A Stylistic Analysis of Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s Social Realistic Paintings
For context, what you’re reading now is a submission for a final requirement in a College course that I am enrolled in, titled “Art Criticism”. My Professor has tasked me and my classmates to write and publish 10 separate articles on various disciplines and styles that had been taught to us during class. This is one of those 10 articles.
These four oil paintings of the Filipina artist Anita Magsaysay-Ho (1914–2012) taken from Artnet.com that all depict and share the important visual characteristics and traits that make up her art style. These four paintings are as follows: Women Feeding Chickens (1979. 80.5 x 150 cm), Tomato Pickers (1975. 91.5 x 76 cm), Women with Baskets, Fish and Crab (1980. 76 x 91 cm), Women With Baskets and Mangoes (1980. 76 x 91.4 cm).
Women Feeding Chickens depicts four women, three wearing green skirts and one in red, carrying rattan baskets while feeding several chickens in wide, grassy farmland. Tomato Pickers is a wide painting that presents to us three white bandanna-wearing women that are picking green tomatoes and placing them in bamboo baskets in a large green field. Women With Baskets, Fish, and Crab presents to us the same women from the previous two paintings but this time they are holding three rattan baskets that permeate the artwork’s foreground and background alongside seafood such as fish and crabs. Women with Baskets and Mangoes depicts the same trio of women carrying vase-like bamboo baskets alongside a white fabric containing four mangoes in the foreground.
Although each of these paintings is of various sizes and particular subject matter, Magsaysay-Ho’s paintings share many common elements, traits, and artistic techniques. The chief among these is her depicting both rural life or women at work as her choices for subject matter, which is the essence of her approach to the genre of Social Realism. According to the Museum of Modern Art, Social Realism is defined as: “A movement that flourished between the two World Wars in response to the social and political turmoil and hardships of the period. Artists turned to realism as a way of making art easily accessible and legible to the wider public, often portraying their subjects — including well-known figures and anonymous everyday workers — as heroic symbols of persistence and strength in the face of adversity.
In each of these four paintings, we see the activities of her recurring trio of green skirted women and their mundane and laborious rural work. In Women Feeding Chickens, viewers come across a wide, landscape-like painting depicting four, barefooted women carrying baskets that contain the food for their poultry, and in Tomato Pickers the viewer comes across the same trio of green skirted women working barefooted while harvesting green tomatoes in a wide plantation. Meanwhile, Women with Baskets, Fish and Crab, and Women with Baskets and Mangoes depict pleasant imagery of the aforementioned trio carrying baskets that contain freshly harvested or caught products such as mangoes and seafood. And, judging from their hand gestures, it appears that they are preparing these two groups of food products for sale.
Lastly, all of these four paintings share similar themes, which can be described as simple and down to earth as expressed by even the art style which these artworks possess. The women in each of these four paintings consistently share the same appearances and lack any individual features. Each of them has black hair, carries a basket, and is smiling while performing each of their menial tasks. As works belonging to the genre of Social Realism, these paintings portray the hard and laborious nature of rural life and the everyday tasks of those that live there. Generally, when we think of hard, tiring, or physically demanding labor, most think of men working mines or handling cattle in wide, grassy fields. Magsaysay-ho instead provides to us a different perspective of this stereotype concerning these four paintings about women engaging in tiring, rural work.
The artist shows us what is essentially an overlooked aspect of rural farm life by focusing her subject matter on the efforts and contributions of women and the roles that they play in these settings and perhaps this is why each of her women lacks much individuality; they are representative of the rural woman as a whole.
Another recurring characteristic present in each of these four paintings is the texture of Magsaysay-Ho’s artistic technique which leaves a rustic and rough appearance on her canvases. The way she shades and blends colors is what particularly gives this effect on the colors of her artworks and this can be seen best in her characters and their clothing. The skin and clothing of the four women in Women Feeding Chickens possess shades of dark and light green mixed in with their natural brown and olive skin tones.
The same could also be said for their green and red skirts which gives them a rough and dirty appearance. As for Ho’s choice of color palettes, it would appear that she restrained her selection with a minimal amount of earthy, “rural” colors such as green, brown, white, and to a lesser extent, yellow alongside their respective light and dark tones. The paintings’ textures overall convey the simple, down-to-earth subject matter of her artworks effectively and as such creates a space in which the viewer can immerse themselves into the setting of paintings.