Anthony Pabillano

I was born in the Philippines and spent the former part of my childhood there, but moved and lived out the rest of my youth in Corpus Christi, Texas. Art has always been a part of me as far as I could remember, becoming an avid student of it throughout high school. I intended to pursue an artistic endeavor in college, however, as we are all aware, life takes us to surprising places, and right on cue, I ended up earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in accounting and now I am a practicing accountant. For years since, I had all but given up on art, but when I began drawing and painting again in 2016, I found a renewed vigor in the creative process, and my life took on completely new meaning and purpose.

Though I create works of art in traditional media (such as graphite, charcoal, colored pencils, pastels, and acrylic paints) and nontraditional media (such as Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel), the medium that I prefer the most is paper. My love of paper as a medium began in high school when my art teacher assigned a Henri Matisse-inspired cut-out art project and when I 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 that I developed back in 2010. My 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.

Ever since I learned to formally draw back in high school, I have always been intrigued by the human form. This fascination has led to my exploring various aspects of the human condition and experience through my portraiture work, from ideas relating to self and identity, to topics about diversity. My current artistic pursuit is to visually celebrate—or otherwise comment on issues related to—the diversity and the individual stories of the people I meet whose walks of life all led to the multiculturally-, multinationally-, and multi-ethnically-rich city of Houston, Texas—the place I now call home.