Aside from her unassailable trademark as the foremost painter of Filipino women, Anita Magsaysay-Ho has always been known to be an experimental modernist, the bold one who dared to try and experiment with various media beyond the traditional confines of oil painting: egg tempera, photograms, woodcuts, Japanese calligraphy, rakuyaki (Japanese ceramic painting), spilled ink, and even working on fabrics.
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The genesis of Anita’s experimental artistic nature can be traced back to 1940 when she studied under the great Victorio Edades in the School of Design organized by the latter, Juan Nakpil, Juan Arellano, Pablo Antonio, and other leading architects of the time. It was Edades who influenced Anita to take the progressive path of modernism, leaving her with the creative maxim, “Paint as you like, express yourself, and create.”
Later that same year, Anita would be employed as a leather worker for a Russian lady. In her autobiography titled An Artist’s Memoirs (2000), Anita writes: “It was my first discovery of the pleasure one can derive from handicraft. My earnings were insignificant, but the experience was priceless.” Anita would also land a job illustrating beds for the ABC Bed Factory.
Anita’s studies at New York’s Art Students’ League in 1946, where she immersed herself in oil painting, portraiture, one-minute sketching, and graphics (woodcut and lithography), and her succeeding enrollment at Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1947, where she learned egg tempera, further fueled her modernist instincts and fascination with everything unorthodox concerning art techniques and style.
Anita also learned the art of Japanese calligraphy and rakuyaki when her family moved to Tokyo in the 1960s. Knowing Anita as an avant-garde modernist, it was around this period that she had also likely encountered the intricately elegant art of weaving fabric and thread into a canvas (recalling her gratifying experience of working on handicrafts in the early 1940s)—one that would later develop into her tapestries of the 1970s.