Paulo has described that privilege not as wealth, but as being born into a family of artists.

His father, Philip Sabado, began training him when he was very young. Anatomy came before freedom. Paulo remembers being required to learn the bones and muscles beneath the human figure, and then being challenged to draw what he knew from completely different points of view.

That discipline stayed.

So did his father's insistence that observation was never enough:

use your imagination.

The work that became Art Maui's 2004 poster began with a structure Paulo saw from the roadside.

The Puʻunēnē smokestack.

Paulo pushed the image into deep cadmium orange and burnt umber, stretching dark wires across the composition and turning an industrial landmark into something more dreamlike.

The subject was also personal.

His father's family came to Hawaiʻi during the plantation era to work in sugar cane.

The smokestack was therefore more than an object in the distance.

It sat inside family history.

Paulo made Yellow House during a difficult transition in his own life.

The subject came from a hotel near the Ala Wai Canal where he once lived with his children, but he did not paint it as straightforward documentation. The palette became unusual. The architecture became psychological. The remembered place shifted toward surrealism.

Yellow House was selected for Art Maui 2002 and was purchased by a Waikīkī hotel.

Yellow House shows what Paulo does at his best:

he starts with biography and lets imagination change what the eye first saw.

Paulo's influences have never been confined to painting.

Film, science fiction, music and surrealism all appear in the way he talks about making art.

That helps explain why some of his strongest work feels cinematic rather than conventionally "island."

A scene can be Maui and still feel strange.

A familiar object can become slightly unreal.

A beautiful image does not have to remain comfortable.

Teaching has been part of Paulo's practice for decades.

He has worked with young artists and people with developmental disabilities, led art classes and used drawing and digital media as tools for participation and expression.

Paulo has connected that work to one of the lessons he received from his father:

you give back.

His teaching philosophy is relational. Trust comes first. Technique follows.

And outside the classroom, former students have continued to recognize him simply as the person who was there to talk about art.

The "Art Guy."

PALMZZZ begins with a scene Paulo encountered while walking at sunset in Kahului: palms held against a changing field of color. The work stays close to that remembered image, then pushes it toward the graphic contrast and cinematic atmosphere that recur across Paulo’s practice.