In 1967, Anita and her family moved to Montreal from Vancouver. Around this time, all her children had now gone to boarding schools, except for Linda, who stayed with her in their home. After more than a decade of being a devoted homemaker, Anita now had that chance to fully return to her first love of painting.
\n\"With more time on my hands, I did two woodcuts for my Christmas cards and began to paint again,\" Anita wrote.
\nBut Anita felt stagnant. Returning to her senses, she recalled that experience when they were still residing in Tokyo, where she learned the art of ink blots from an old Jewish lady. Learning from this recollection, Anita threw ink on her canvas, then water, then oil, where they would \"rush and run into each other.\" \"You will be surprised to see how beautiful the image of 'rocks' emerges,\" Anita said. \"That's how the Chinese do those rocks. After it is done, you will be surprised to see the 'rocks' by the sea or the logs in a forest. Of course, you improve on the rock,\" she said.
\nAnita's ink blot paintings can be viewed as another successful and earnest era of experimentation after her pioneering use of egg tempera during her modernist heydays of the 1950s. Anita would say that these ink blot paintings encapsulate her painting style that is most \"difficult, if not, impossible to duplicate,\" as \"the shapes formed by the ink blots cannot be repeated as they are.\"
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Anita’s On the Beach, Reclaiming One’s Identity and Memories
\nThe work on offer in this auction, On the Beach, from that series of experimentation, was painted by Anita when the Ho family moved to Hong Kong, dictated by Robert's Magsaysay Lines' relocation of its main office from Tokyo to Hong Kong, where it would now be known as Fairmont Shipping. In Hong Kong, they established their twentieth family residence at the old Estoril court before moving to a larger apartment in Grenville house on Magazine Gap Road.
\nOn the Beach depicts four women mending and preparing the nets to be used by the men, most probably their husbands, in their fishing ventures. The ink blots cast by Anita resulted in seemingly hollow voids that exude mystery. The women's nets become diaphanous extensions of the rocks made by the ink blots, the background suggesting a mountainous landscape that evokes the terrain of Anita's Zambales youth. The scene captures Anita's recollections of spending summer vacations in her family's nipa house by the beach. But, the overall composition exudes a mystical version of an otherwise real-life-inspired setting.
\nArtist-critic Alfredo Roces wrote in his book on Anita: \"MagsaysayHo created these images at a time when she herself was caught in the dilemma of changing worlds, between a past home in the Philippines of her happy childhood and the promise of her family's new homeland in Canada. A disparity, the uncomfortable juggling of two worlds, is the migrant's lot. It is this edgy, uncertain, precarious condition that the artist has recorded on canvas. The anxiety and the certainty of an uprooted person shape the artist's vision, and her works from that time revealed this.\"
\nRather than entirely creating images culled from her memory, as she had always done, she let her medium speak for itself. Was it suggesting an answer that Anita probably wanted during this time, seeking to uncover why in the world she must be uprooted from the environment from which she had fond memories that inspired her to pursue her creative passion? Or was it Anita submitting to an otherworldly Being all her feelings of alienation and anxiety as a way of purging all these negative vibrations, and in the process, letting her blissful memories of days past speak clearly to her at the forefront as a way of preserving her intimate bond with her motherland, which she dearly loved and treasured?
\nThe ink blot paintings produced by Anita during her Canadian and Hong Kong periods differed in how the latter exudes more luminosity, whereas the former possesses a relatively somber palette. Roces observed that the Hong Kong period was where Anita's memories of her youth \"triumph[ed] over the reality of her happy sojourn in Canada, the land where Anita's children grew up in, and where, no doubt, their own coming-of-age memories of \"home\" would have to reside.\"
\n“[It was in Hong Kong] where I lived for 17 years,” said Anita. “I consider this time my most productive years.” In her memoirs, she speaks highly of her Hong Kong years, writing that she “played a lot of bridge” there. “The interesting shopping for me was going to Stanley market—a shopping area by the sea, where one finds clothes not found in Hong Kong stores—and exploring Hollywood Road for antiques. I guess this is what newcomers in Hong Kong do.”
\nAnita further wrote, “I also painted as much as I could.”
\nThe relative clarity Anita achieved in her paintings in Hong Kong, where she felt the most productive and prolific, may have been because her dear Philippines was now a mere 2-hour flight away, easing her homesickness. Anita also had more time for leisure and painting, as her children now had their own lives and families to build.
\nThe mid-1970s, when Anita created On the Beach, also marked the beginning of her \"Green Period,\" which critic Alice Guillermo described in the catalog notes for Anita's retrospective as named after \"its predominant coloration.\" \"The green that predominates is the hue of leaves, fruit, and vegetables, and the women figures share this color quality perhaps symbolically as they become like fruit in harmony with nature.\"
\nIn a way, Anita had claimed a resolution to her own misery by finding the meaning of home in her own family and nourishing them with warmth through her experiences of tenderness.
\nAs Roces noted, \"If the present and the future were uncertain, there was warm refuge in happy memories of the past.\"
\nThat Anita chose to delve into ink blot painting is a testament not only to her modernist spirit of bold experimentation; it is a demonstration of Anita going into her subconscious, demonstrating a capability of profound introspection.
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