The pregnant pause gives birth to evocative work

It is the intimate moments, the quiet pauses between emotions or actions which Hanneke Benade portrays in her almost life size pastel drawings

By Steve Kretzmann

It is the intimate moments, the quiet pauses between emotions or actions which Hanneke Benade portrays in her almost life size pastel drawings.
Although she studied printmaking with Dianne Victor – an artist she has nothing but praise for - at University of Pretoria in the early ‘90s, charcoal, and later, powder pastels, became the medium of choice with which she has worked ever since, creating evocative images, often described as baroque, predominantly of women in contemplative states or seemingly caught in the middle of doing something else.

Benade’s images exist without reference to time (except perhaps for the apparel worn by the model) or place. So although she has lived in the small country town of Robertson in the Western Cape for some time, there’s no reference to landscape, whether rural or
urban, her figures are routinely drawn against a black backdrop or darkened interior.
Thus the choice to live in Robertson was more about quality of life, she says, than any need for artistic inspiration, as her ideas emerge from within rather than being influenced by what is around her.
“Ek werk van binne na buite, nie van buite na binne (I work from the inside out, not from the outside in). I have these images and I work to get them as close as I can to what I see in my head,” she says.

Working from photographs taken of a chosen model, Benade says she places them in a context where “it’s not about where they are physically, it’s more about where they are emotionally”.
“Almost like Edward Hopper’s work, but without the set.”
Her intention is to create an open-ended interpretation for the viewer. “I don’t want to force any idea onto anyone.”

She describes her works as being “like a play, a silent move, a freeze frame”, and immediately mentions the latest movie she’s watched: the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, which she rates as excellent and, obviously somewhat of a Coen brothers fan, goes on to mention the merits of Fargo and O Brother Where Art Thou. Less inherent in the images she produces, Benade describes them as “the silence between the notes”.
“It’s the silent moment before you turn around. We have that throughout the day, those intimate moments when you think no-one’s watching.”
And focussing on this subject matter, and the pastel medium, has treated her well. Her most recent exhibition, held in a farmhouse outside Oudtshoorn during the Klein Karoo Kunstefees, was almost sold out, and her work resides in numerous corporate and private collections, including those of Spier, Absa and Sanlam.
Her upcoming exhibition ‘In Time’ at the Everard Read gallery in Cape Town, introduces an interesting twist in that she places adults in childhood contexts or in the midst of traditional childhood games.She agrees the exhibition is about a longing, or nostalgia, for a certain emotional space that exists in childhood but is lost when we become adults. “We sometimes long for things that were and for how things used to be,” she explains, but there is also the realisation that we can never go back, we no longer fit. This is almost literally illustrated in some of the paintings, such as one of an adult man and woman enacting the childhood tea party, dwarfing their chairs and table. Childhood games being played by adults is a theme throughout this body of work which introduces – consciously or not, Benade doesn’t say – an appealing surrealism to the works.
And having worked with pastel for most of her artistic life, she is a past master of the medium, describing her hands and fingers as her most valued “tool”, as she uses them to mix her colours, much like someone working with oils would. In fact she says her works are often mistaken for oils because she layers the colours, as is also often done with oils, and one or two of her unglassed works have been damaged by people checking exactly what the medium is (she doesn’t use fixative as its long term effects on the paper are unknown).
While still happy with pastel, the challenge of a new medium is calling and she drops some hints about what she has planned – but laughs and warns me not to let on too much or people will start having expectations.

‘In Time’ opens at the Everard Read Cape on September 18