Dallas Artist Anthony Padilla Brings Texas Vegetation and Color to New York Art Scene

You can take the artist out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the artist. Dallas native Anthony Padilla made a name for himself in New York painting landscapes inspired by his roots in North and East Texas. His floral and forest landscapes have adorned various murals in the city and have been seen at solo and group art shows in the Big Apple, London and Taiwan.

He’s come a long way from his first art show at Dallas’ 4DWN Skatepark in 2015. (He returned to Dallas to host a second 4DWN art show, with the 2020 Flourish event). In his 10 years living in New York, Padilla’s art style may have returned to his roots, but his day-to-day lifestyle as a working artist has evolved to meet his big-city environment.

“I like to catch the morning light, especially this time of year,” he says, “because in New York the sun goes down really early at like 4:30 p.m. since we’re further north. Winter solstice is the shortest day, it’ll be down at like 4:15. So this time of year I like to get up really early and catch the full amount of daylight.”

Sirens sound in the background of his Brooklyn apartment. From there, the artist gazes at the city while he returns to one of the pieces he works on interchangeably. After a few hours of work in the morning, he'll venture into Manhattan for a meeting where he’ll be doing touchups on some of the murals he’s ben contracted to patch up in the growing Hudson Yards neighborhood on the West Side. He’s also organizing the production of a new mural. Like a true Texan, he complains about the cold, as he stops at the art shop for supplies before heading home. There he starts on a small painting while waiting for a larger one to dry.

“I like to have multiple paintings going at the same time,” he says, “like two or three, because working with oil paint you have to give it time to dry. The style I’m doing now, I’m doing several layers of dark greens and blues. The new work, it’s more small little marks, dots and brush strokes. It makes it look like you’re looking at a forest, a jungle oasis. Doing that new style, I have to build it up from the background floor, from the darks to the light, so I do a lot of layers where I just put — I’m not even exaggerating — a million little dots on these canvases.”

This technique can be seen on his Instagram, where he keeps followers engaged with entertaining videos that timelapse or catalog in real time his layered process. This technique is new for the artist, and it’s just one of the ways Padilla’s artistic style has grown and developed.

Always a fan of drawing and doodling, Padilla recalls being in daycare doing chalk drawings of tornadoes over and over. He also from his elementary school days a journal he kept. It had an alien monster and an astronaut fighting on the side of a rocket ship that he would trace endlessly. This continued into middle school and thereafter, when he met a friend’s older brother who was a skilled illustrator.

“I’ve always had that fascination and appreciation for the ability for someone to take an image out of their brain and put it down on a piece of paper,” he says. “You can either use words to describe something, like a poet describes the moon in a beautiful way, or you can use your drawing techniques, your hand, to create a visual. It’s a window into your mind and soul, whether it’s through dancing, writing or drawing, painting, I’ve always had an appreciation for that.”

Though he always enjoyed art, Padilla didn’t move to New York, like many do, to be an artist. He's a lifelong skateboarder, and that was his main focus when moving, along with his love for the city he’d visited many times before.

“Being here in New York I eventually picked up a job in the art industry,” he says. “I was doing work for artists framing and mounting pieces. I just realized there’s just so many different artists out here. It’s different than Dallas; New York is known in the art world. When you put yourself in that environment and you see other artists who are successful and actually making a career doing art, that really put a fire in me.”

In a New York Minute

With a new perspective, he began noticing there were lots of open art submissions and opportunities to get his art out there. Padilla began chatting with locals, which helped put him in a position to share his work. Eventually, little by little, he started getting invited to participate in group shows or submit his work for small publications.

“Being able to share my work and having multiple opportunities to sell my work and show it in different places, it starts to feel real,” he says. “That’s when I took it really serious, like, 'Hey, I can do this, I can put myself out there.' It’s a lot of community support. There was a lot of support from friends, family and just random people. That goes a long way.”

Though New York City inspired him to become a working artist, his roots were what presented him with the opportunity to do his first show and full-sized mural. Being closely connected with the team at 4DWN Skatepark, he was asked by his longtime skate buddy Rob Cahill to be the host of 4DWN’s first art show, where he painted a 100-foot mural that covered the indoor skate space.

“Even today I’m looking at this painting like, God, I hope it comes out right,” he says, “but that feeling of accomplishing it when it’s done is so attracting and addicting. The first major time that feeling came across to me was at 4DWN when I did that huge mural.

“It was 180 degrees different than what I’m doing now. Think very geometrical, a lot of shapes, and imagine a skatepark along the wall, ramps coming up flowing with the shape of the wall. So I was kind of flowing with the shape of the wall and the shapes were kind of moving and dancing in the same direction. It’s squares, circles, triangles, squiggly lines, flowing; but that was my style before. I did a lot of abstract-y geometric work.”

Since moving to New York, the artist reflects on how his style has almost turned away from his current surroundings and returned to the scenery that shaped his youth in Dallas and East Texas.

“All the way through my time in Texas I was doing geometric, abstract shapes,” he says. “I think about this pretty often because Texas is definitely more nature, more open spaces. I can go out to the country and be in the forest. In New York it’s not like that, it’s actually blocks and squares. So I took myself out of Dallas, moved to New York and my style completely changed to this jungle-y experience. It’s floral and trees, and thick bushes and leaves. I can’t explain it other than maybe a part of me is still going back to my roots, and I started to express that through painting. It happened overnight, really.”

Padilla’s artwork featuring colorful, floral works and jungled-out nature scenes stand out among some of the darker and more city-centric works in New York. His latest series turns the lights down and presents forest displays at night, sometimes with a waterfall or luminescent moon for some extra complexity.

“Now I’m just teaching myself and learning techniques to really play tricks on the mind and take you to the places I’m painting, giving you depth and emotion,” he says. “When I see these paintings, I get these questions often, like, what is the point or what is the purpose, and for me it’s all about the feeling of being by yourself out in nature and just having an experience with the beyond.

“Sometimes when I’m looking off in the distance, whether over a valley or mountainside, like grand nature, whether it’s a place like that or looking over the ocean or a jungle space, I’ll get a moment of clarity where everything kind of makes sense in a way. It’s almost like a flow state where everything’s making sense and you really appreciate this place that we’re on, this planet, this universe.”