Attributed to Anita Magsaysay Ho, no coa, private collection, medium: oil measurements: 43"wx31"h framed, no glass in frame, good condition Biography: Anita Magsaysay-Ho was a Filipina painter who specialized in Social Realism and post-Cubism in regard to women in Filipino culture. Magsaysay-Ho's work appeals to Modernism by utilizing more abstract designs and styles rather than realistic approaches.Magsaysay-Ho found inspiration from her childhood and important women in her life.Although she traveled all her life and encountered many different women from different cultures, all of the women in her paintings are of Filipinas because they are what she is most familiar with.Most of her paintings deal with Filipina women performing tasks such as cooking, harvesting, and tending to farms and children. The women she paints are seen without anger and are not concerned with gender roles or politics, as the women in her childhood were not.Magsaysay-Ho has revealed that she takes a liking to painting women who are at work in the fields as it shows their true strength.Despite frequently travelling, Magsaysay-Ho consistently painted the Philippines based on her memory. Magsaysay-Ho's favorite medium to paint with was egg tempera as used in her earlier work, but the physical demands forced her to utilize other techniques. So, she would paint by means of oils, acrylics, drawings, and lithographs. Her egg tempera paintings, however, are now some of her most sought-after works of art. In the early 1940s, the influence of her teacher Fernando Amorsolo was clearly visible, both in terms of subject and brightness of the paintings. Some call Magsaysay-Ho the "Female Amorsolo" because, like Fernando, she prefers having women as her subjects of painting. Her work appealed to Social Realism and post-Cubism by painting distortions and semi-abstract faces and portraits. It evolved toward Modernism, which, among other things, is expressed in its Cubist style.Magsaysay-Ho's work can be distinguished between the decades. In the 1950s, her work was exhibited in The Philippine Art Association (PAG) and grouped among other notable Neo-Realist artists. This period is when her most notorious work that involved light and dark contrasts of Filipina women hard at work were created.The 1960s brought along more articulate, spaced-out figures and softened tones. A decade later, her work was inspired by Chinese calligraphy as she created objects found in nature by using ink blots. Finally, in the 1980s Magsaysay-Ho utilized green hues to portray fruits and vegetables that oftentimes resembled women.Her most famous work includes "Two Women," a painting portraying two Filipina women with white head-wraps shucking corn together while smiling, "Cooks," featuring three Filipina women with pots full of food in front of them, and "Mending the Nets" that shows two Filipina women conversing while stitching a net. All of these won first place at The Philippine Art Association.