If walls really could talk, artist Scott Lenhardt‘s childhood bedroom in West Rupert would not shut up. The stories seem to lie in wait. In a huge flat file, drawings and paintings peek from folders and raggedy manila envelopes. Artwork made over four decades is stacked on every surface, evidence of Lenhardt’s nonstop creativity — and his habit of saving everything.
There’s a self-portrait he made his first year in art school and cartoons he drew at age 7. There are colorful crayoned posters — prizewinners! — for Rupert’s game suppers. In the window hangs an old jean jacket decorated with a painting of angsty-looking Jane’s Addiction front man Perry Farrell.
Even the room’s ceiling is painted — with a deep purple sky, thick tree trunks and wavy grasses. Lenhardt, 46, said he created the jungle-ish theme Sistine Chapel-style when he was in high school, lying on scaffolding his dad built. The paint is flaking now, ceding to gravity. On the floor, in place of a bed, more than a dozen snowboards huddle inside a corral of cardboard boxes.
None of these items ended up in Lenhardt’s current exhibition at the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum in Stowe: “Scott Lenhardt: Artistic Contributions to Burton Snowboards, 1994-Present.” But plenty of other artworks did.
Lenhardt’s designs for Burton Snowboards are legendary — defining strands of the brand’s aesthetic DNA.
This is more than a snowboard showroom. Lenhardt’s doodles, preliminary drawings, illustrations for posters and magazine spreads, and framed pages of handwritten feedback from art directors provide connective tissue — and glimpses into the artist’s brain.
The Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum show was curated by Dave Schmidt, who was Burton‘s vice president of global sales for 17 years and serves on the museum’s board. He conceived of the solo show while working with Lenhardt on a previous exhibit of ski and snowboard art at the museum called “The Art of the Graphic.”
“During that,” Schmidt said, “he told me he saved everything, and I figured that would be another exhibit.”
Lenhardt said he was excited when he read Schmidt’s emailed proposal. “I thought, This is the right time to do this. I’d been holding on to all this stuff for so long.”
He rifled through his bedroom-cum-storage room, pulling out items and arranging them in his dad’s garage for consideration. “Then we whittled it down to what had to be shown,” Schmidt said.
Lenhardt’s work spans other formats and mediums, from oil portraits to murals to cartoons, all of them defining an artistic career that has included immersion in the New York City cultural scene and travels around the world.
The Stowe museum illustrates why Lenhardt’s designs for Vermont-based Burton Snowboards are legendary — defining strands of the brand’s aesthetic DNA.
“I don’t think there’s ever been an exhibit like this, about one artist and every scrap of paper he’s ever scribbled on,” Schmidt continued. “I can’t think of anyone who has contributed as much to the sport as Scott has.”
‘The Scottness’
At Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum, Lenhardt’s exhibition is arranged in roughly chronological order. Circumnavigating the first-floor room clockwise, visitors can witness the evolution of his snowboard designs over more than 25 years. On the earliest one, a 1994 prototype board for Burton, a portrait of Perry Farrell turns up again, screaming silently into a microphone.
Lenhardt said he painted the prototype board “to sort of show off — it was my calling card for the industry.” He was riding for Burton that year but was more interested in pursuing the art of the board.
It caught Shannon Dunn‘s eye. The Olympic medalist (now Dunn-Downing) liked Lenhardt’s painting, as well as an angel tattoo he had drawn for a friend, and asked him to design a board for her.
The 1995 Shannon Dunn Pro Model became Lenhardt’s first Burton board, and visitors can see its design in a framed illustration right beside the prototype. It features a winged angel dropping flowers, her long hair becoming a cascade of ribbons interspersed with petals. Those graceful lines would be a signature of Lenhardt’s artwork, even in a fearsome series of later boards inspired by ’80s pulp horror.
In a statement for the exhibition, Michael Jager, cofounder of the Burlington firm Jager Di Paola Kemp Design (and now chief creative officer of Solidarity of Unbridled Labour), calls Lenhardt’s work “the perfect metaphor for riding.” He’s not the only observer to remark on the fluidity of Lenhardt’s style, but he’s uniquely positioned to speak about the heyday of snowboard design and branding.
Jager met company founder Jake Burton Carpenter in 1989, before Burton relocated from Manchester to Burlington. Burton and JDK collaborated “as snowboard culture was emerging,” Jager said in an interview. “We weren’t engineering, but we were deeply involved in everything else.” That included hiring artists to create original work for snowboards.
Jager considers snowboarding the punk to skiing’s glam rock. “Burton was coming in and destroying and leveling the playing field,” he said. “Everything we were doing with snowboard graphics was designed to do that. We looked at snowboards as more like album covers. It was about communicating what you wanted to convey to the world.”
Lenhardt grew up with Burton, first as a rider and then as an artist. “He’s a part of the soul of snowboarding, genuinely at the start of it at a very young age,” Jager said.
All of Lenhardt’s snowboards are striking works of art. While their variety is remarkable, they have in common an ineffable coherence that former JDK art director Jared Eberhardt dubbed “the Scottness.”
In Lenhardt’s early 2000s designs for professional rider Ross Powers, the line work variously manifests as smoke, licks of fire, tendrils of hair or clouds. The images also incorporate fierce warrior fantasies. Like every board in the exhibition, these show an exacting attention to detail and composition.
In 2002, Vermont-born Powers won Olympic gold in the half-pipe riding his third Lenhardt-designed board. It depicts a robot charging with unstoppable force through his previous boards.
Lenhardt’s more recent Thinker series, in collaboration with pro rider Danny Davis, pairs clean, geometric shapes in vivid colors with black-and-white cartoonish images such as a loose-limbed rider or a giant eyeball. The latter might remind older viewers of R. Crumb comics from the 1960s. Lenhardt’s wavy fonts are equally reminiscent of the psychedelic era, even sans color.
Former Burton senior designer Jackson Tupper worked with Lenhardt and Davis on the Thinker series for two seasons — 2020 and 2021. In his written statement for the exhibition, Tupper claims his primary role was “serving as a soundingboard for Scott trying to translate Danny’s crazy ideas into drawings.”
Lenhardt always exceeded expectations, Tupper writes, meeting the vision of a project while maintaining his unique style. “He’s just too good at what he does,” Tupper concludes.
While the snowboards are the main attraction, the wealth of sketches, notes and other illustrations in the exhibition offer a window into Lenhardt’s process.
“The cool little pieces in the exhibit are these sketches where he’s trying to work out an idea,” Schmidt said. “It’s all done by hand,” he added. “None are done digitally at all.”
Lenhardt turns a preliminary sketch into a finished painting and hands it in for production. “Leo Listi is the guy,” he said, citing Burton’s senior manager in graphic production. “First they take a high-resolution photo, and then he goes to town separating the colors so they can put it all back together.” Over the years, Lenhardt noted, the technology and color reproduction have gotten a lot better.
A few drawings in the exhibition quietly show the progression of Lenhardt’s skill, the growing confidence in his hand. To wit: an angular colored-marker sketch called “Skater Dude,” made when he was 10; and an illustration in acrylic, ink and watercolor titled “Sunday River Meditation,” created 25 years later.
The latter was part of a trio of snowboard-related artworks Lenhardt made for Burlington’s South End Art Hop “in maybe 2010,” he said. “I was thinking about New Yorker covers when I did that.”
In “Sunday River Meditation,” a male figure sits in a lotus position, eyes closed, on the floor of what looks like a hotel room. His boots, gloves and snow pants are scattered about; a snowboard leans against the wall. Outside a glass door, snow is piled on a deck and railing. Rendered in muted hues, the image appears serene, yet it fairly crackles with underlying vitality. Thousands of tiny lines and crosshatches transmute ink into volume, light, shadow and the undulations of a blanket on an unmade bed.
The illustration could be a segue to Lenhardt’s work that is not included in the museum’s snowboard-focused exhibition, such as oil portraits of Jerry Garcia playing his guitar, Michael Jordan going in for a layup in front of a packed auditorium, and a spot-on Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Missing from the exhibition, too, are Lenhardt’s adorable, rotund creatures, which wouldn’t be out of place in a J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy; his album covers; his poignant pet portraits; and his sassy cartoon heroine, Twenty Four Hour Woman.
Taken together, all these artworks help tell a story about Lenhardt growing up, drawing and riding in southern Vermont; living, working and dating in New York City; painting and playing music internationally; and making his way home again.
West Rupert
Andrea and George Lenhardt decamped from the New York City borough of Queens in 1974 and settled in the tiny rural outpost of West Rupert, Vt. Two years later, on June 14, they and daughters Mandy and Karrie welcomed baby Scott to the family.
Andrea had graduated from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology with a degree in apparel design. “I laugh, because look at me now,” she said. She found that the business of fashion “just wasn’t my thing.” Since 1998, she’s been the town clerk of Rupert — and, for the past decade, its treasurer.
Andrea continued her creative pursuits with painting and other art projects, and her children happily followed suit. “Anything from snow sculptures outside to building Legos, crayons, anything like that,” she said. “They all just liked to do it; I didn’t have to make them.”
Her son was 4 years old, Andrea said, when she recognized his precocious drawing skill. “We went to see Star Wars. When we came home, he drew not only the [movie] screen but the seats going down the aisle — in perspective,” she recalled. “And when they were doing drawings of outer space in kindergarten, he knew how to draw the rings around Saturn. It just continued as he grew up.”
George has an artist’s eye, as well. “My dad was a body shop manager for years, and he has a shop at the house,” Lenhardt said. “He painted cars on weekends, flames on helmets, stuff like that. He would take me to custom car shows — that was an early influence. There was a lot of hands-on creativity here in the Lenhardt crew.”
Mandy (now Mayer), just 16 months older than her brother, remembers entering a contest for local kids to make posters for the annual Rupert game supper. “Scott won every single year,” she said with a laugh.
Now a nurse at the Mettawee Community School in West Pawlet and a mother of two, Mandy said she enjoyed art projects growing up, “but not as much as Scott did.
“He would draw every single day, even on family vacations,” she said. “For Scott, the most fun was sitting and drawing with his friend for hours — cartoons, action figures, things like that. There’s something to be said for daily practice. In fact,” Mandy added, “he gets mad when people say he’s talented and think it comes easily to him. It’s really a lot of practice.”
The young artist relished positive feedback, though. “At that age, people would say, ‘You’re good at this,’ and it felt good,” Lenhardt recalled.
In their sparsely populated corner of Vermont, the children attended tiny elementary schools. “First and second grades were in a one-room schoolhouse in Rupert,” Lenhardt said. “In third grade, you moved to a two-room schoolhouse in West Rupert. There were six kids in my class. The older kids helped the younger kids; everyone in the school heard you reading.”
He was in sixth grade when he learned about snowboarding, Lenhardt said. “I saw a Burton video … and I thought, You could do that here.” He also liked that the art culture around boarding “was right up my alley — monsters and stuff.”
The following year, artist Brian Sweetland and his wife moved to West Rupert and befriended Lenhardt’s parents. “He played with my dad’s softball team, and he was a plein air painter,” Lenhardt said. “He became my idol. I would go and watch him paint.”
In time, Lenhardt asked Sweetland to teach him. “He’d say, ‘Meet me tomorrow at 10.’ And then he’d say, ‘Sit on that rock and just draw cows.’ It was like a six-hour day. I got so sunburned,” Lenhardt said. “But I was like, I’m not going to move; I want to show this guy that I’m serious.”
Lenhardt learned how to draw cows. And slowly, he learned how to look, he said. “Brian didn’t just paint trees or whatever; he painted the air! He would just become one with everything out there — very Buddhist.”
Lenhardt also learned that making really good art is really hard. “You just have to put the time in,” he said.
Visitors to Lenhardt’s exhibition might not associate him with pristine landscapes such as Sweetland’s. But in a virtual talk (now on YouTube) that was part of the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum’s Red Bench speaker series, Lenhardt demonstrated his mentor’s influence on him by sharing two images side by side for host Chris Copley and the audience. One was a painting of, yes, cows and trees by Sweetland; the other was a detail from a Ross Powers snowboard. Though the styles are dramatically different, the compositions are identical. Even Lenhardt seemed pleasantly surprised to realize it.
“Every time I do anything, Brian is my high-water mark,” he said. Sweetland, who died in a freak accident in 2013, would surely have been pleased.
Lenhardt attended high school in Salem, N.Y., which was closer to West Rupert than any Vermont high schools. “I think I was a pretty quiet kid,” he mused. “There wasn’t a lot to do around here, so I’d just go up to my room and draw. Sometimes kids would ask me to airbrush T-shirts for them.”
He was a lot less quiet when playing bass in his band, Butt Pie — a name Lenhardt chalks up to eighth-grade male humor. But the group survived middle school. (“We’re technically still a band even though we don’t play,” Lenhardt quipped.) Butt Pie would later be invited to perform — twice — at the U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships in Stratton.
But first, there was Bromley Mountain.
Bromley Buds
“Bromley was my second home,” Lenhardt said. “With Burton right over the mountain in Manchester, that was huge … having something cool in our zone.”
Lenhardt grew up skiing in a junior program, but he switched to snowboarding in seventh or eighth grade. “I didn’t like ski boots because my feet would fall asleep,” he said. Ironically, he worked in Bromley’s ski boot rental department during high school, but his heart was on the slopes.
“I met my crew up there,” he said. “My best friend Jesse Loomis and I would go up together, and we met these other local guys who were really good.”
Some of those boys had been riding at Magic Mountain but switched to Bromley when the former resort closed in 1991. Dubbed Glebelands after nearby Glebe Mountain, the crew earned a reputation for spirited, not-quite-kosher antics. Lenhardt said he would hijack his family’s video camera every weekend to capture them mid-shred.
“At the end of the day, we’d go down to Burton, and the store manager would let us put our tape in so we could review our day,” he said.
The name Glebelands lives on in snowboarding lore in part because some of the crew, including Randy Gaetano, became pro riders.
“It was a really amazing thing,” Gaetano said. “Half of us were in high school; a couple were a little older. We’d be up there as much as possible.”
A top rider in the mid- to late ’90s, Gaetano attended Saint Michael’s College in Colchester and pursued an art career of his own — including snowboard design. Now living in Maine, he returned to Vermont in December for the opening of Lenhardt’s exhibit, which he called “a monument.”
“It was so great to see a bunch of my favorite people,” Gaetano said. “The Glebelands crew is still very close. We still text each other daily.”
Vince LaVecchia was one of three brothers from New Jersey who also rode at Bromley. At the time, he was attending college at St. Mike’s and busing south on the weekends to teach snowboarding to kids. “I would take the kids and link up with Scotty and Randy and the others and rampage the mountain,” LaVecchia reminisced in a phone call from his home in Oregon. “So those kids got a lesson in how to ride at a pretty high level!”
LaVecchia later joined the Burton marketing department and then became a team manager; a highlight was managing the career of future champion Shaun White. Today, he works as a consultant. “I’m constantly calling him for advice about what to charge or whatever,” Lenhardt said. “He’s a management guru.”
Nearly all eight Bromley buds “went on to do something in the snowboarding industry,” Lenhardt noted. One of them, Shem Roose, worked for Burton in Burlington, then moved to the West Coast to become the photo editor for Transworld Snowboarding. Now a freelance photographer and videographer in Vermont, Roose shot the pictures for this story.
Lenhardt’s entry into the snowboard biz came early. At 17 or 18, he recalled, he did a drawing for a Burton newspaper ad. “And I was a sponsored rider my senior year in high school,” he said.
Lenhardt had no interest in competing on snowboards, though; he preferred to paint them.
Learning Curves
In 1994, when Lenhardt was preparing for college, he said, “one of the guys at Burton questioned why I was going to art school. He said, ‘I could teach you everything you need to know.’ He went on to become creative director of Adidas.”
Although Lenhardt would soon design his first official board for Burton, he rejected that corporate path. Instead, he enrolled at Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art & Design) “because I could snowboard there and they gave me a half-tuition scholarship.” At the time, the school had only about 300 students, Lenhardt said. Lacking an actual campus, it held classes in locations around the city, including a drafty former factory.
“I always felt sorry for the nude models — it was so cold in those buildings,” he said.
He enjoyed his classes, the grassroots vibe and the camaraderie with other students. But before Lenhardt’s junior year, Gaetano successfully pitched him on a semester abroad in Florence at Studio Arts College International.
“It’s a tiny international school for art students, just three or four blocks from the Duomo,” Gaetano described. “We lived in an apartment with two guys from Boston and a fifth guy who was a prince or something from Kuwait.”
He and Lenhardt would go to classes during the week and spend weekends riding trains around Italy or elsewhere in Europe, absorbing as much as they could.
“I have reels of Super 8 of our adventures,” Gaetano said. “It’s probably one of the greatest memories of my life, being with your best friend in Florence just looking at and breathing art.”
Yet the exposure to ubiquitous Renaissance masterpieces was intimidating. “I’ll never be this good — why am I bothering?” Lenhardt remembered thinking. “Coming from being ‘the art guy’ in high school — and then you go there, and it’s so humbling.”
Back in the U.S., Lenhardt took the next semester off, living in Burlington and “trying to figure out what I wanted to do.” His girlfriend at the time, who lived in New York City, persuaded him to try Parsons School of Design. Lenhardt gave it a year.
“It was great, but it wasn’t for me,” he said. “I skipped classes and just went around the city with an easel. When things were tough, I thought of Brian. I envisioned him standing by a stream.”
Lenhardt was also devastated by the death of a friend, pro rider Jamil Khan, who was killed in an avalanche in the California Sierras in 1998 at age 22. “That had a huge impact on me,” Lenhardt said.
He left New York and returned to Maine, where the school had changed its name and renovated an old department store for classes, Lenhardt said. He settled on a printmaking major and finally graduated in 1999.
During his college years, Lenhardt continued to design snowboards for Burton. “That was my summer job,” he said. The company also hired him to paint a mural at the entrance of its Burlington headquarters, where it remained for 21 years.
“It just got Sheetrocked over last year,” Lenhardt said.
Bridging Brooklyn
In 1999, while much of the world was fretting over the potential apocalypse of Y2K, Lenhardt decided to give New York City another try. Again, the instigator was Gaetano, who had moved to the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn and invited Lenhardt to live with him.
Over the next two decades, Lenhardt would move in and out of the city, working for Burton in New York, Vermont and around the world and wheeling through various jobs, apartments, roommates and romances.
Through his then-girlfriend, Lenhardt connected with Simon Doonan, who was head of window dressing at Barneys (he now calls himself a “creative ambassador at-large”). In June 2001, Lenhardt was given his own window for a month, then joined the decorating team.
On the morning of September 11, he was working on a Barneys window display when planes flew into the World Trade Center. “I think that was my last day on the job,” Lenhardt said.
After 9/11, New York City was just too strange, he said. He returned to Vermont and lived in a Winooski apartment with musician Brett Hughes for nearly three years. “All of Brett’s bands rehearsed in that apartment, so I got a crash course in the Burlington music scene,” Lenhardt said.
In addition to his Burton work, other art gigs came his way — among them an album cover for Trey Anastasio, freelance design for JDK and several illustrations for this newspaper. Lenhardt, Gaetano and other friends worked on epic art installations at Phish festivals — including Coventry, meant to be the band’s finale, in August 2004.
“And now there’s another girlfriend, who also lives in New York, so I thought, I gotta move down there again,” Lenhardt related.
Another impetus was his first solo art exhibit in Manhattan, at Taxter & Spengemann.
“It was Scott’s glass light boxes, kind of dioramas,” explained Pascal Spengemann, who cofounded the gallery in 2003 after six years as curator of Burlington’s Firehouse Gallery (now BCA Center). Spengemann, who had previously shown this older work of Lenhardt’s at the Firehouse, arrived in New York for what he called an “exciting moment” in the gallery scene.
“People were interested in taking a chance on young artists,” Spengemann said. “Scott really stood out, though — there weren’t a lot of people doing what he does.”
In September 2005, Burton Snowboards opened a store in SoHo, and Lenhardt snagged the job of window dresser. “I convinced Burton to give me a decent salary and rent me a studio in Brooklyn,” he said. “It was a huge responsibility; I had to get my shit together.”
That job ended six months later, when Lenhardt needed time to prepare for his second solo show at Taxter & Spengemann. The exhibit included such a mix of work and mediums that “it looked like a group show,” he said. His Michael Jordan painting was in it. So was a life-size, airbrushed fiberglass horse. Both sold.
In no time at all, Lenhardt found himself in the New York scene. He met and began to play music with Miguel Mendez — “kind of an Elliott Smith/Beck vibe,” he said. Over the next couple of years, the band played local clubs, had a residency at the Knitting Factory nightclub and performed at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas.
One of Lenhardt’s girlfriends was Lesley Arfin, then a writer for Vice. “She knew everybody; hanging with her, that’s when New York really opened up for me,” he said.
Arfin later headed to LA and became a comedy writer and producer for television; she now has a podcast called “Filling the Void.” In a phone call from her car, Arfin praised both her “super-cute” friend — he seems to remain friends with all of his exes — and the portrait he painted of her late, beloved goldendoodle, Judy. “It’s museum-worthy,” Arfin declared.
In 2007, Lenhardt was busy “playing in the band, working, doing some album covers and a lot of illustrations,” he said, when Burton came calling to whisk him away. The company had just opened its first Stash snowboard park, at the Northstar California Resort.
“They wanted me to do the murals inside the cabin,” Lenhardt said. “They flew me out to Tahoe. I’d drive up the mountain, turn on the generator and paint all day.”
That mural was a memorial for pro rider Craig Kelly, the first snowboarder to have a signature snowboard. The four-time world champion, known as “the godfather of freeriding,” died in 2003 in an avalanche in British Columbia.
“She can do everything, anything, and makes the most menial tasks fun.” Parker Posey
The following year was even busier: Lenhardt painted three more Stash murals — in New Zealand, Killington and Austria — and played with the Brooklyn/Burlington band Heloise and the Savoir Faire on a two-week European tour. He was part of a group exhibit at Taxter & Spengemann. And he began a relationship with actor Parker Posey, known for her iconic grunge-era roles in films such as Dazed and Confused and Party Girl.
“Parker came to the art show opening,” Lenhardt said. The first thing she said to him, he recalled, was “I saw your painting. You must have a very small brush.”
For their first date, Lenhardt picked up Posey in his 1989 Honda Accord. “She loved it, so I thought she was cool,” he said. “She was creative, funny and knew all these famous people. I tried to be normal — I think that’s what I brought to the relationship: the calm, country vibe.”
Posey had purchased an old house in the Hudson Valley, and Lenhardt began to spend most of his time there. “She’d go to the city, and I mainly stayed up there,” he said. “I turned this little barn into an art studio.”
Posey loved Lenhardt’s doodles of a funny, naked, potato-shaped lady with weird hair and urged him to do something with them.
“The 24 Hour Woman idea came from an Enjoli perfume coffee mug,” she explained in an email. “I’d gotten it from a Salvation Army or a Goodwill — it was a white mug, with pink cursive writing on it that said ’24 Hour Woman.’
“I’m sorry I don’t have a picture of it, because the 24 hour woman is … well, the proof is there, in all those drawings!” Posey added. “She can do everything, anything, and makes the most menial tasks fun.”
“Parker and I would sit around and come up with ideas — it became a woman caught in the act of doing something,” Lenhardt said. Those ideas turned into the concept of a day calendar with a naked lady doing something mundane, or preposterous, on each page.
“And that’s when we split up,” Lenhardt said.
Suddenly, he was back in Brooklyn, crashing in a friend’s art studio before moving in with Joe Shepard, a friend from Burlington and a member of the Savoir Faire. Lenhardt threw himself into producing and selling the Twenty Four Hour Woman calendar. He handled every aspect, from drawing to shipping. “This is about a woman who does everything, so I felt that I should, too,” he joked.
Lenhardt made more than 2,000 new drawings over seven years of producing the calendar. “The 2020 calendar was greatest hits, all my favorites,” he said. And it was the last one. Now the naked lady appears daily on Instagram and occasionally in tattoos.
When COVID-19 arrived in New York City, Lenhardt had just sent Burton sketches for his second Danny Davis snowboard. “They approved it March 13 and wanted me to send them [paintings] in two weeks,” he said. Working intensely in his studio, he said, “all I heard was ambulances and birds all day. Then this banging of pots and pans at 7 p.m. for the medical staff.”
The connection to snowboarding in those early days of lockdown was a psychological life preserver for Lenhardt. “It’s so important to me,” he said. “I’ve met many of my closest friends through that.”
That summer, Lenhardt and a girlfriend left the city to work on a 60-acre farm owned by friends in Rhinebeck, N.Y. “We learned how to process chickens,” he said. “The way things were, it felt like it could be the end of the world.”
By the end of summer, Lenhardt knew he needed to return to Vermont.
His New York years now seem like “kind of a blur,” he said. He recalled an incident that, for him, sums up life in the city.
“I was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and this guy [in another car] gestured that I roll down the window,” he said. In a distinct New York accent, the man yelled to him, “What are we doing here?”
Taking it as an existential query, Lenhardt gave him a Lewis Carroll-worthy response: “Because we don’t know what’s going to happen on the other side of this bridge.” Seemingly satisfied with that answer, the man rolled up his window.
Home Again
Now Lenhardt is settled in what he calls “Lenore’s house,” right next door to his parents in West Rupert. Lenore Johnson, now deceased, was once like a grandmother to him and his sisters. He’s renting the place from her out-of-state son and would like to buy it someday.
“Lenore was this eccentric, creative Italian woman from Queens,” Lenhardt explained. “The house is kind of like a time capsule.” It’s still filled with her many collections; tchotchkes adorn every surface and wall. Some of the floors are covered in motley carpet samples from the 1960s. Lenhardt kind of digs it, though he admitted to removing a few gingham curtains.
In a corner of an upstairs bedroom, Lenhardt has set up an easel. He’s currently working on a large commissioned portrait of the girlfriend of his friend Homer Murray, son of actor Bill Murray.
Lenhardt described oil painting as a slow, painstaking process, but once he’s in it, “I can’t think of anything else,” he said. “The first thing I do in the morning is go fix something. Then I spend the rest of the day thinking, Why did I do that? I have to overwork it to death before bringing it back to life.”
He reiterates Brian Sweetland’s mantra: “Just keep your brush moving.”
Lenhardt has installed a second small workspace in what used to be Lenore’s husband’s gun room, he explained. The shelves are lined with leopard-print fabric.
Other art jobs for Lenhardt are waiting in the wings, including beer-can labels for his friends at Slow Fox Farm Brewery in Rhinebeck. The pet portraits “just keep coming,” he said. And he’s eager to finish up a film he wrote that he made with Roose. Titled Shadow Self, it’s about a father and son trying to start over after a car accident in which the mother and a sibling are killed.
Lenhardt does not anticipate designing for Burton this year, though. “That’s just the nature of the work,” he said.
During a tour of Lenore’s house, as well as his parents’ house across the drive, Lenhardt showed off paintings by Sweetland and his own work from decades past. Asked if he finds it easier to work in Vermont or New York, he replied, “The city is exciting, and you can feed off the energy, but when I do the work, there is nowhere I’d rather be than here.”
Lenhardt’s friends variously describe him as mellow, genuine, kind, funny, soulful, humble. The word “homebody” would not be out of line.
“I think it’s important, as an adult,” Lenhardt said, “to work on and tend to the bridge that connects you to your childhood.”
He’s comfortable where he is, he said, and happy that an old friend from the New York music scene is moving to Rupert. Best of all, his family and Bromley Mountain are still close by.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Great Scott | A Burton Snowboards exhibit spotlights artist Scott Lenhardt’s rad skills”
Related Stories
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2023.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
