Lisa Benham
Art Form
Visual Artist, Musician
Media
Oil, mixed media, assemblage
Artist Bio
Now settled in Zion Canyon, Utah, Lisa Benham was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, earning a BFA (Painting and Drawing concentration) along a with minor degrees in music and psychology. Before and after graduation, Lisa worked in several therapeutic recreation contexts, specializing in differently abled populations. Her roles ranged widely, from guiding various adaptive outdoor experiences to studio art instruction.
After raising a family while expanding her creative edges to work primarily as a digital artist in Silicon Valley for almost two decades, she returned to formal education, earning an MS degree in Environmental Studies, a certificate in GIS (think deep play with maps), and a certificate in Buddhist chaplaincy. Always seeming to meld her areas of interest in unexpected ways, she combined much of the above while working as a paid "eco-chaplain," teaching meditation, mindfulness, and ecological literacy in both San Quentin State Prison and Elmwood, the Santa Clara County Jail, before moving to Springdale, Utah in beautiful Zion Canyon in autumn of 2015.
With her recent and deepening return to the fine arts, she continues to reside and creatively thrive in this amazing canyon community, along with her amazing wife and two cats. Their co-founding and proprietorship of 2 Cranes Inn-Zion in neighboring Rockville provides yet another avenue where she can broadly share her love of place through creative offerings.
Artist Statement
My endless curiosities carve diverging and reconverging paths which continue to defy simple categorization. Landscape painter? Fiber artist? Illustrator? Photographer? Assemblage and metal sculptor? Even during my career as a web and digital graphic designer in Silicon Valley, my CV opened with the description “radical generalist.” “What if…?” seeps into many portions of my creative process.
I enjoy learning traditional foundations, soon to watch myself run amok, blending disciplines and breaking boundaries, often including those literal edges of the art pieces themselves.
The natural world remains an endless source of wonder and wellbeing for me, and I feel almost remiss when not lending at least some creative eye or homage, daily, to nature’s endless treasures. My professional time as an outdoor guide along with my environmental academic background further enhance the dizzying fractal depths and simultaneous simplicities with which nature presents itself, everywhere. I humbly try to capture what too often feels inexpressible, as I build small, fleeting artifacts — love totems to what I see, feel, and wonder upon.
