Lee Udall Bennion

Lee Udall Bennion and her husband, Joseph Bennion, both descend from a long line of pioneers. They live in Spring City, a Utah village, where Lee paints and Joe makes pottery, which he fires in a wood-burning kiln. They call their dual artistic endeavor Horseshoe Mountain Pottery {http://HorseshoeMountainPottery.com/}. They have three daughters, who share their passion for gardening, riding horses, hiking in the nearby mountains, and rafting on wild rivers. Lee’s paintings have appeared in many group and individual exhibi￾tions and have achieved a number of awards. Over a hundred images dat￾ing from 1983 to 2008 are available for viewing on their joint website. All her paintings are in frames that Lee has hand-carved and painted. Her subjects are domestic, local, and familial. She predominantly chooses to portray people. However, she insists that “portraiture is not my main con￾cern. My painting deals with form, color, and feelings foremost.” There are also landscapes and still life paintings which, she says, “tell more how I feel about a place or a set of objects than what they actually look like.” In￾variably, her subjects appear in simple, sparse settings. Often they merge into symbols. For example, a painting of 1993, Divine Meditation, shows a woman (likely Lee herself) whose head and elongated neck are suffused by an aura of light. The painting on the back cover of the present issue of Dia￾logue portrays a child—perhaps Lee’s grandchild—with wings and a spotted dog. In such paintings, the ordinary and commonplace mingle with the transcendent and divine. Although her Mormonism is rarely explicit in her paintings, her faith underlies all of them. “I hope my love for God’s creation and my fellow human beings shows through,” she said in a recent interview. “Everything I do reflects my religion.”