Although his first passion was painting in the early 60’s, Aurelio “Boy” Pena spent almost his entire professional life as editor and freelance writer, writing features and fiction for various national and international magazines.
After working for Dole Stanfilco as editor for six years, he took a course in Magazine Writing at the Writers Institute of America based in New York. Seeing his output in writing and photography, the Paris-based Sipa Press, a global news photo agency took him in as their Philippine photojournalist, covering world events. This was followed by Asiaweek magazine which took him as its Philippine correspondent.
Between those years as news editor, photojournalist and fiction writer in the 1980s, 1990s to 2000, Pena operated and managed a few small businesses that were outside his passion for writing and painting. These were a publishing outfit producing trade directories, manuals, road maps and guidebooks for ten years before opening his own import export agency office that looks for buyers and sellers in the global markets and help arrange shipments for both imports and exports for another ten years.
Aurelio "Boy" is always with me in my office!
Despite dropping from college after six years at the University of Mindanao, Pena earned his masters in modern business management from the New York based Alexander Hamilton Institute. This opened new opportunities for him at the USAID project Private Investments and Trade as consultant, later at the German project GETZ and finally at the Japan International Cooperation Agency or JICA as chief editor of their industry cluster program in the Philippines. His links with these foreign aid agencies gave him opportunities for travels to Germany, France, Japan, and Indonesia in the 1990s.
Pena’s return to his original passion, painting, was started when someone who just came from a European tour and visited the art museums and was so enamored by the masterpieces that she begged him to copy some of famous pieces from a book bought in Paris. He was forced to make replicas of masterpieces by Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, etc. That started his journey back to his old passion, painting. Although, he also did some original abstracts, Pena likes to do replicas of both Fernando Amorsolo and Juan Luna--- as his personal tributes to these two great Filipino artists…..
