What at first appear to be patchworks of woven fabric are actually intensely detailed drawing in the work of Hector Alonzo Benavides. Up close, the threaded patterns are revealed to be made of tiny dots, circles, squares, and triangles, minutely sketched with an ultra-fine-point ballpoint pen. Some are purely black and white, and others have rainbows of lacelike accents or filigrees in metallic inks, resulting from Benavides’s experiments with color over the many nights he spent producing hundreds of drawings in his Texas home. He sometimes devoted ten to fifteen hours at a time to these art sessions, rotating the paper as a piece organically evolved. When he started in the 1960s, Benavides was engaged with portraits and drawings of animals. His work became increasingly abstract, although an occasional bird was still incorporated into the lattices of lines. He once called himself “the most obsessive man you’ll ever meet” and cited a spiritual influence: “I just sit down and ask God what he wants me to see. And then I see the picture in my head. The entire thing. It repeats over and over while I’m working.”
A devout Roman Catholic born in Laredo, Texas, in 1952, Benavides grew up on his family’s ranch in Hebbronville. He stated that despite the abstraction of his drawings, they were embedded with meaning; triangles, for instance, represented the Holy Trinity. He had always enjoyed drawing as a child and made it a lifelong practice, but the death of his mother in 1996 propelled him to immerse himself in his art as a way to channel his grief. He also used it as an outlet for his obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms, explaining, “I’ve turned a negative into a positive.”
He worked in various jobs, including as an optician, a substitute teacher, and a security guard in San Antonio, creating drawings in his off hours but usually keeping them to himself, until a cousin brought them to the attention of the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas, in the early 1990s. His work was included in the touring exhibition Spirited Journeys, Self-Taught Texas Artists of the Twentieth Century, organized by the University of Texas at Austin in 1997, bringing his intricate work to wider appreciation before he died, in 2005.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
