HECTOR ALONZO BENAVIDES
Energy, restless nervous energy. The kind that vibrates at 3:45 in the morning. Sleepless, all night energy, the energy that Hector Alonzo Benavides transmuted in to art, during long, still, south Texas nights. Hector Alonzo Benavides was born September 2, 1952 in Laredo, Texas. Hector was the youngest of three children of Juan Manuel Benavides, Sr. and Maria Eliza Richer. The Benavides families have been ranching in Texas for over 100 years near Laredo, Texas.
Benavides sister recalled Hector always carried a pen began drawing at an early age, remaining in the house near his mother and sisters drawing. After graduating from Hebronville high school Benavides went to Tyler, Texas, where he studied to become an optician. In 1970 his father died and he moved to Laredo where he took a job as an optician and lived with his mother. Benavides’ work as an optician was short-lived. Extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and a rare disorder that caused shortening of the tendons, causing him to require braces to stand and crutches to walk.
In the early 1980’s, Benavides was encouraged by family to enroll in an art class that was teaching still life drawing. At the end of the first day of class Benavides was told that he was un-teachable, as he would not compromise his use of woven lines, dots and chevron designs drawn with ink flowing from his pilot ultra fine point rolling ball pens. Hector began to draw portraits and animals using lines, dots and chevron designs. He began to frequent the Denny’s restaurant in Laredo, where a large mural of a deer was painted on the wall He would sit near the mural and draw people in the restaurant. Benavides would sit at the same table every afternoon drinking coffee and drawing, using the people in the cafe as models. People in the cafe, who told him to stop staring at them, often ridiculed Benavides.
Benavides work has became increasingly abstract with an occasional bird or animal, which might appear hidden among the abstractions. Benavides rotates the paper while he draws so that his pieces have multiple bottom planes and are signed on more than one corner. There is an overall organic quality to his compositions; the spiked repetitive triangular designs have a visual effect reminisant of the cactus needles that proliferate the landscape where Benavides grew up in south Texas.
Nighttime is said to be the creative time, while the spirits of the mundane are at rest from their daytime labors while others are sleeping. Benavides used to draw and paint anywhere from 10 to 15 hours per night. When seen in reproductions, Benavides’ work is often mistaken for woven fabric. He wove lines of ink into compositions using a strait edge to draw parallel lines, and crossing over them with more parallel lines which forms thousands of squares, which where then colored in using color combinations of the Mexican flag’s red, white and green and the Texas flag’s red, white, and blue colors. In the market in central Laredo one can find the Mexican saltio blankets hung out for sale to the tourists, with much the same colors that Benavides used in his drawings.
Benavides rarely displayed his own art in his home. He said, “I have already seen it on my drawing board why would I want to look at it again”.
For Benavides the personal importance of his art, was in the act of creation, itself which transforms and transcends the finished product. This separation between “I create for Me, out of My own need”; was a personal thing for Benavides; where as the finished product is for You, the viewer, and was separate, apart from the compulsive personal experience. For over a decade Benavides only audience had been his immediate family, but more especially his mother, who would sometimes tell him to stop working on a drawing, just before the pen battered paper gave way and the pen broke through.
About an hour to the west of Laredo lies the city of, Del Rio, once the home of another Visionary Tex-Mex artist Consuelo”Chelo” Gonzalez Amezcua, Amezcua who worked with ballpoint pens with similar colors in a similar obsessive style. Amezcua and Benavides share a similar repetitive line quality.
When Hector spoke of his drawings with his signature “squares, dots, triangles, circles and lines; he referred to the squares as the cage he lives in with his obsessive-compulsive disorder; and the circles as his escape out of this disorder. Benavides, a devout catholic, refers to the triangles as a representation of the holy trinity, father, son, Holy Spirit. This he repeated again and again like a mantra. Benavides also used silver and gold paint markers on some works layering them in to textured metallic landscapes, of which he said, “Silver and gold are the most precious metals on earth; that is why I use them”. Benavides worked with his eyes extremely close to the surface of the paper. He rarely sees his work from a distance of more than several feet. This is an unknown side of the work to Benavides himself whose drawings change dramatically when viewed from a distance. The dots of ink are layered with the light ground of the paper contrasting the darker areas stippled with ink forming areas of light and dark that seem to undulate. For a while he dedicated all of his artwork to his deceased Mother. Benavides was totally devoted to his art; and he boasted of being the most obsessive-compulsive person in the world. This can be felt in each piece, offering a view into the mind of this talented man, driven to create a world of his own, loaded with emotion, obsessive and compulsive energy. Benavides said, “Through my art, I have taken a negative and turned it into a positive”. Benavides moved to San Antonio in 1997 and worked as a security guard several nights a week. Later, he moved to the family ranch in South Texas to reside until his passing in 2005.
Benavides’ work was included in The University of Texas at Austin, traveling exhibit, Spirited Journeys, Self-Taught Texas Artists Of The Twentieth Century. His work is included in many wonderful collections across the world and the prestigious art collection of Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
- Bruce Lee Webb ****published in Raw Vision #27 (Spring 1999)