Lyman Orton
Lyman Orton
A Man of Action
by Joyce Marcel
Lyman Orton is willing to put his money where his heart is, and his heart is deeply rooted in Vermont.
Lyman Orton
A Man of Action
by Joyce Marcel
Lyman Orton is willing to put his money where his heart is, and his heart is deeply rooted in Vermont.
Lyman Orton, a seventh-generation Vermonter and the “proprietor” of the worldfamous and old-timey Vermont Country Store, has combined three of his greatest passions—art, planning and Vermont—into one large project, “The Art of Action: Shaping Vermont’s Future Through Art.”
How? For Orton, who has spent 35 years amassing a vast collection of Vermont art and ephemera from the 1920s through the 1970s, it means starting a new collection—one of paintings that haven’t yet been painted.
To accomplish this, he has personally given 10 visual artists an average of $25,000 each to create works of art based on their visions of Vermont’s possible futures—good and bad. His goal is to influence—“tease” is his word—the discussion of the state’s future by introducing the vision of artists.
“He’s given all of us an extraordinary gift,” said Alex Aldrich, the head of the Vermont Arts Council, which is organizing the project. “Anyone with money can hire an artist to create something they like. It’s a very different thing to throw the dice at 10 artists and challenge them to create cause-oriented art. To say, ‘I trust you to come up with something that’s going to challenge the state of Vermont to examine its values and its politics and social mores and get people talking.’”
I met with Orton at the spacious, light-filled main office building of the Vermont Country Store in Manchester. At 67, he’s an extremely fit man with sandy hair, a sly grin and a wicked sense of humor. He showed me some of the art he’s collected — it hangs everywhere in the building. Among the paintings are a great many landscapes in different styles. Other works show typical Vermont scenes like ice fishing, haying, skiing, plowing with horses or oxen and quarrying slate.
At the heart of his collection is “Changing Times” (1940-1950) by Vermont artist Kyra Markham. It’s a large painting of two grey, muscular and yet diaphanous oxen.
“The oxen are disappearing, and through them and under them are all these tracks of bulldozers and tractors and so on,” Orton said. “The tracks of progress are overtaking the disappearing oxen from the older days. She left Halifax in 1959. This painting was her parting allegory of what she was concerned about in Vermont.”
THE FAMILY BUSINESS
Orton’s father and mother started the Vermont Country Store catalog out of their home in Weston just after the Second World War. It was designed to capitalize on nostalgia.
“Things had changed in the world,” Orton said. “And my father intuitively knew ‘the good old days’ was a great story. He wasn’t a great businessman, but he was an excellent writer and thinker. So the catalog business suited him perfectly. But soon people started saying, ‘We’re coming up to the Vermont Country Store.’’ So he scurried around and opened the store.”
Orton himself joined the family business when he was just five or six. First his mother let him stamp the backs of checks with a rubber endorsement stamp.
“It was fun,” he said. “Then she taught me to use the adding machine. I put the checks on the left and the machine on the right, and she put a piece of paper over the right side of my face so I couldn’t see the machine. ‘You have to learn to do it by touch,’ she said. ‘If you’re looking at the keys, you’ll make mistakes.’ Then of course I worked in the store, waiting on customers, cutting cheese, bagging up whole grains—stuff that kids could do.”
Orton graduated from Middlebury College in 1963 with a degree in political science.
“Then I drove back down to Weston and put my apron back on,” he said. “It was seamless. My roommate went to the Peace Corps. I came back and ran the country store.”
In 1991, Orton started to detach himself from the store’s day-to-day operations.
“It was like, ‘OK, it’s time for my Peace Corps,’” he said. “And I landed in Steamboat Springs, an old ranching and coal mining community way up in northwest Colorado. When I’m in Colorado, I’m able to look at Vermont, squint at it from afar, think about it differently, ponder things.”
Orton now “shuttles” back and forth between Colorado and Vermont. In 2006, the Weston Antiques Show exhibited some of his collection. Speaking at the opening, he had his epiphany.
“I said, ‘My next collection will be art that’s not yet painted. It will be art that speaks not to the past of Vermont, but art that speaks as life as it can be, could be, should be, maybe we don’t like it, whatever, but that gets us thinking more about the future.’”
Where did the idea come from?
“When you climb up to 10,000 or 12,000 feet on your bicycle in Colorado, the air is thin and your mind works different,” he said. “But I don’t really know. Rocky mountain high?”
ART AND ACTION
Orton started talking to Aldrich, and they put out a request for proposals for art based on raw data collected by The Council on the Future of Vermont, which had just spent a few years going around the state asking people what they thought were Vermont’s most important issues.
Three hundred artists from 26 states and three foreign countries applied. In September 2008, 20 finalists were selected; they were each paid $2,500 to create a proposal. In February, 10 artists were chosen and given commissions of an average of $25,000 each.
“Artists have to make a living,” Orton said. “They can’t afford to spend three years making a lot of art that they don’t know if anybody’s going to buy. They’ve got to feed their families. Thus I said to Alex, let’s pay them to do this kind of art, and then auction it off and see if people have an interest in it. Our hope is what they produce, which will travel around to 24 communities around the state, will start to put Vermont on the map for Vermonters. Maybe they’ll say, ‘Maybe I’ll take down the covered bridge or the old barn that’s hanging over the fireplace, and hang this up.’”
The exhibit will open in Manchester on September 1, move to Brattleboro two weeks later, then travel around Vermont for 10 months. The auction will be at the Main Street Landing Performing Art Center in Burlington on Saturday, July 17, 2010. Then 10 percent of the sale will go to the artists. The rest will go into a fund to start the project all over again.
“It’s a huge leap of faith on Lyman’s part, and one deserving of an enormous amount of respect,” Aldrich said. “What needs to be said is that it’s a very rare thing to work with someone who has such a clear vision and the money to make something substantial happen.”
Orton is hoping the project attracts back some of the many young people who have left the state. Also, that it gives a shot in the arm to Vermont’s creative economy.
“Maybe the collectors will want to come in, because where else is this happening?” he said. “This is unique. Vermont needs a buzz that will speak to people anywhere in America. We’ve got it going on here in Vermont. Isn’t it interesting what we’re doing here in Vermont? I’m just funding the first round to kick it off. It’s our little stimulus package.”
