About Acidhead

Anthony “Acidhead” Basilio was born in 1975 in Baesa, Quezon City. The son of a comic illustrator, airbrush artist and sign maker, he grew up in his father's art and sign shop, watching his father work. The smell of paint on t-shirts and jeepneys, and the sight of his father sketching late into the night, became the lullabies that led him to finally pick up a brush of his own in the 1980s.

Surrounded by local comic books and Heavy Metal magazine, he sharpened his hand with lead and ink. A fascination with horror and dread became his springboard into comic illustration, first as a hobby, then as a lifelong practice.

In the 1990s he traded paper for skin, becoming a member of the Philippine Tattoo Artists Guild (PhilTAG) in 1995. As vocalist and drummer of the band Barang, Death Metal music worked its way into his veins and, from there, into his artwork — alchemy, surrealism, spiritualism and the celestial folded in alongside it. A stint in the Middle East from 2005 sharpened his hand further as a mural and decorative artist, before he returned home to tattooing.

An avid motorcycle enthusiast, he found a new canvas in 2013: leather. What began as saddle bags and seat pans grew, through beveling, stamping and thousands of hours of hand-tooling, into custom motorcycle accessories that carried his name into blogs, magazines and shows like Motorcycle Diaries. Wanting a bigger canvas still, he moved to large hides — tooled, carved and painted — where the same recurring threads of his work, the surreal, the dread, the spiritual and the celestial, are given room to fully unfold.