Montrose – 1st and 6th Ward
Artist Website
Social Media
Creative Disciplines and Mediums
- Subject Matter: Portraiture
- Style: Realism
- Medium: Paper, Mixed Media
Bio
Anthony Pabillano is a Houston-based artist born in the Philippines. He is an artist at Archway Gallery since 2019, a member of the Filipinx Artists of Houston and Drawing from the Wound collectives both founded in 2019, a board member of the Visual Arts Alliance since 2017, and an alumnus of Fresh Arts’ Artist INC Class of 2019.
Pabillano studied art for four years in high school culminating in a 2-D figurative AP Art portfolio concentrated on phobias and in an artwork being displayed in the United States Capitol for a year. Since returning to art after a years-long hiatus, Pabillano has participated in exhibitions locally and nationally, the latest being the 49th and 50th Annual ALH ‘Celebrates Texas Art’ 2019 and 2020 juried by curators from the Whitney Museum and MoMA, respectively, and the 2019 National Prize Show in Cambridge, MA.
Pabillano focuses on portraiture based on realism and rooted on his desire to explore various aspects of the human condition and experience, from ideas relating to self and identity, to topics about diversity. His current artistic pursuit is to visually celebrate the diversity and the individual stories of the people he meets whose walks of life all led to the multiculturally-, multinationally-, and multi-ethnically-rich city of Houston, Texas—the place he now calls home.
Artist Statement
Though Anthony creates works in various traditional dry and wet media, the medium he prefers is paper.
His love of paper began in high school with a Matisse-inspired cut-out project and when he used wallpaper scraps to create a replica of Madonna-and-Child. These two undertakings—cutting blocks of paper in organic and geometric forms per the Matisse project, and cutting into paper to convey the contour lines of the Madonna-and-Child image—form the foundation of the style of paper art he developed back in 2010.
His method of conveying the three-dimensionality of form involves cutting blocks of paper and layering them, with the layers of paper in gradations of color that are in turn cut in such a way that follow the contours of the different values on the form.