Charles Benefiel

Overview

Benefiel was born in Venice Beach, California. After a mental breakdown in 1997, friends urged him to go to a mental health center, where he received his OCD diagnosis.

His work has appeared in psychiatry and art magazines. He creates large-scale pieces, some up to 5 x 8 feet, using a neurotic stippling method without preliminary designs. After stippling, he soaks the works in tea and treats them with chemicals to achieve an aged look.

Style and method

Benefiel renders his work through stippling with very precise rapidograph technical pens, without any preliminary drawings or guiding lines. He has stated, 'There was no need to stay in the lines, because there are no lines.' In representational drawings, he works from the center outward; in drawings of rows of numbers, he stipples characters from left to right as on a typed page. He counts dots to a certain point, then repeats the sequence.

After the dots are complete, he tones the paper with tea for visual depth and an aged appearance. This method provides exceptional incremental control, eliminates spontaneity and error, resembles photographic grain, and serves his OCD. He also produces pictures with figures like giant-sized child's dolls, often centered and surrounded by numbers. In the early 2000s, while living in New York City and New Mexico, Benefiel created the 'Random Numeric Repeater' series using ink and watercolor on paper with a 'dumb language' of dots, circles, and dashes, each symbol corresponding to a numeral and sound he made while drawing.

Later, he returned to California after five years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he created and managed The Loom, a 250,000 square foot former factory housing light manufacturing and artist studios. While living in San Diego, Benefiel suffered two massive cardiac arrests six months apart, causing extensive brain damage from hypoxia. He experienced aphasia, loss of short- and long-term memory, and loss of visualization and hand-eye coordination needed for his drawing.

He underwent a long rehabilitation program and began practicing Vipassana meditation to rebuild harmed neural pathways. He now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is beginning to explore incorporating art back into his life as spiritual healing.