Pacita Abad: Google pays tribute to Filipino visual artist with colorful Doodle

Google paid tribute to Ivatan and Filipino visual artist Pacita Abad, through a colorful artistic style doodle on July 31, 2020.

Who was Pacita Abad?

Pacita Abad was born on October 5th, 1946 in Basco, Batanes, a small island in the northernmost part of the Philippines, between Luzon and Taiwan. She was renowned not only for her bold use of color and mixed media but also for her use of art to address global themes.

Pacita Abad earned a BA in political science at the University of the Philippines Diliman in 1967. In 1970, she went to the United States expecting to study law, however rather earned a degree (MA) in Asian History at Lone Mountain College (University of San Francisco) in 1972 where she upheld herself as a seamstress and a typist. Abad studied painting at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and The Art Students League in New York City.

Pacita Abad lived on 6 unique landmasses and worked in more than 50 countries, including Guatemala, Mexico, India, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, Mali, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, and Indonesia.

At Corcoran School of Art Pacita studied under Berthold Schmutzhart and Blaine Larson in which the two teachers had helped launch her artistic career. Pacita then further pursued her studies at The Art Students League in New York where she focused on still life and figurative drawing under John Helicker and Robert Beverly Hale.

During Pacita’s time in the San Francisco art scene, Pacita Abad had married painter George Kleiman, however, they later isolated. She at that point chose to traverse Asia for a year with Jack Garrity, and afterward came back to the U.S. to study painting, first at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C. and later, at The Art Students League in New York City. While in California, she at that point wedded Stanford MBA student, Jack Garrity, who became an international development economist.

On July 31st in 1984, Pacita Abad broke gender barriers in the Philippines by being the first woman to be given the nation’s Ten Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) award. Abad earned this honor through her staggering body of artwork that uses differentiate — between her wildly colorful style and the societal issues being delineated like poverty — to move the watcher.

Pacita Abad gladly acknowledged the TOYM award, despite the local commotion the declaration caused. In front of her acknowledgment, Abad intensely said that “it’s time a woman was among the Ten Outstanding Young Men.”

Later in life, Pacita Abad’s style moved, making another style of painting known as trapunto, which includes stuffing a canvas to add a third dimension to the artwork. This new style helped Pacita Abad make bold pieces, for example, 1991’s “Caught at the border.”

While Pacita Abad sadly died to Lung cancer on December 7, 2004, at the age of 58 in Singapore. Yet the artist’s works still live on. You can see a lot of her art online, including the powerful and moving “Portraits of Cambodia” series from 1979, which features her global point of view by sharing insights into everyday life for some in the Asian nation.

She over 30-year painting career started when Pacita Abad made a trip to the United States to undertake graduate studies. She displayed her work in more than 200 museums, exhibitions, and different venues, including 75 solo shows, the world over. Abad’s work is currently in public, corporate, and private art collections in more than 70 nations.

On July 31, 2020, to pay tribute to Pacita Abad, Google has appointed a homepage Doodle vivified by her particularly colorful style. Over on the official Doodle blog, Google likewise shared some of the elective drafts of their artwork, including one intended to exhibit the trapunto style.