Feliciano Peña

Herminio Feliciano Peña Aguilera (b. Silao, April 25, 1915 – Mexico City, May 16, 1982) was a Mexican painter and engraver. His work was recognized with membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana and was a founding member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Grabadores.

Life The son of a carpenter and a schoolteacher, Peña was born in Silao, Guanajuato but moved with his family to the Tlalpan borough of Mexico City in 1926. He completed primary school there, where his talent for drawing and painting was first recognized. As there was no middle school near the family's home at the time, his mother enrolled him instead in the Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre, where he studied from 1928 to 1932 under Tamiji Kitagawa kitagawa and Francisco Díaz de León.

As a printmaker/engraver, he worked in relief and photogravure and grain wood. He created few color prints but was very prolific in black-and-white.

He is best known for his landscape painting even though he did portraits, still lifes and human figures. His style is a faithful representation of nature, without distortion of form or light. His representation is more "classical" than that of Impressionism, done in clean luminous colors with attention given to volume. One of his influences was José María Velasco, with a similar perspective painting valleys, gulleys, groves and observations points. Raquel Tibol stated, "Feliciano Peña did not want to possess nature but rather to understand it in a dimension that would be apprehensible both physically and mentally."