Toots Magsino

Toots Magsino's art is hard to categorize, because her work doesn't easily fit into any particular way of working. She makes combinations of a sort, mixing literary and visual imagery together. Her figurative imagery is usually markedly personal and accompanied by handwritten stories woven into the abstract backgrounds of her pictures. They are expressive in an emotionally resonant way perhaps because of a variety of means. Her color sense is understated, basic, and natural yet highly personal and articulate. She has a particularly well-developed sympathy for her materials and she transforms shapes and objects to serve her pictorial goals. Like a true alchemist, Magsino changes the mundane and the everyday into the profound and the timeless.

There is a sincerity and earnest drive to express her own personal history, her experiences of a multi-cultural nature, aesthetic, sometimes poignant, and often highly personal. Ms. Magsino freely consults her relationships, friendships, and encounters with people both past and present to inform, inspire and populate her images. However, her work is basically autobiographical, with Ms. Magsino as the central character, even if only and often by virtue of the spirit.

The overall feeling of a lot of Toots Magsino's work is compelling, and vaguely reminiscent of an intimate diary on the nature of existence. It is both a courageous and daring act to risk personal revelation."

Ronnie Landfield, New York City, January 2007

"The world Toots conjures in her painting, printmaking, collage, and mixed-media practice serves as a diary of her inmost thoughts and feelings as a Filipina in a foreign land. Imagery consists of fragmentary, shadowy, ambiguous forms - autobiographic markers of her personal and artistic development in a global city. The agony of search for "my place in the sun" haunts her pictorial idiom as much as nostalgia, the daily need to be in touch with family and friends, and the passage of time."

Emmanuel Eric Torres, Manila, February 2007