Lee Udall Bennion (born March 17, 1956) is an American figurative painter based in Spring City, Utah. Her work includes portraits, domestic scenes, landscapes, and religious subjects, often presented in frames she carves and paints herself. Her paintings are held by the Springville Museum of Art and the Brigham Young University Museum of Art.
Early life and education Bennion was born in Merced, California, and moved to Utah in 1974 to study art at Brigham Young University (BYU). She married ceramicist Joseph Bennion in 1976, and the couple settled in Spring City.
She interrupted her studies after the birth of her first child. In 1983, when she had two daughters, she returned to BYU; she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1986. David Ericson offered to represent her after seeing her work at her senior exhibition.
Career Bennion received a Utah Arts Council visual arts fellowship in 1988. A contemporary artist biography described the fellowship period as 1988–1990.
In 1999, the St. George Art Museum exhibited 22 of her paintings and drawings in Lee Bennion, Paintings and Drawings. Reviewing the exhibition for The Salt Lake Tribune, Martha Sonntag Bradley discussed Bennion's family portraits and depictions of southern Utah, emphasizing her elongated figures, patterned surfaces, and use of color.
She served on the Utah Arts Council board and reviewed visual arts grant applications in 2004. In 2008, she and Kathleen Peterson co-curated Frames of Reference: Images of the Manti Temple at the Central Utah Art Center.
Bennion exhibited with Brian Kershisnik and Kathleen Peterson in Practicing Charity at the Church History Museum in 2014. Her printmaking was included in a 2016 exhibition at Spring City Arts. The works, made in 2013, combined etching and aquatint with watercolor and depicted subjects including horses and family members. Old and New, a 2019 exhibition at David Ericson Fine Art in Salt Lake City, paired her paintings with her husband's pottery.
Work Bennion's subjects include members of her household, gardens, animals, and religious imagery. In her account of her working process, she describes beginning with observation and then allowing memories and feelings to shape the painting, rather than retaining a literal likeness. She carves and paints the frames used for her paintings.
Critics have discussed the relationship between domestic life and emotional or spiritual themes in her work. In her review of Old and New, Rebecca Pyle noted the combination of brightly colored flowers with reflective or uneasy moods. Reviewing Earthbound and Heavenward at the BYU Museum of Art in 2026, Shawn Rossiter compared Bennion's self-portrait Daily Bread to the frontal arrangement of religious icons, interpreting its depiction of a woman holding bread as an association between daily labor and sacred imagery.
Collections The Springville Museum of Art holds Bennion's oil paintings Self in Studio (1985), Full Bloom: Nicole and Daniel Ben Yehuda (1989), and Snow Queen: Portrait of Adah (1992). The BYU Museum of Art holds Daily Bread (c. 1990), an oil self-portrait donated by Gary Ernest and Judy A. Smith in 1994.
References
External links Official website