Crafting a Life in Maine | Scott Budde on Art, Farming & Finance

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit with Maine connected individuals. And we are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today it is my great pleasure to speak with Scott Budde, who is a financial services executive and also an art collector. And I just learned today that he is a stealth peony farmer along with his wife up at their wonderful farm on the banks of the Sheepscot River in Alna. Thanks for coming in today.

Scott Budde: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I'm so tickled by this whole thing, because you told me that you specifically did not mention the peony stuff, and of course that's what I want to talk about. But just to put it out there, you have peonies, you bought a house that has peonies, peonies now go out into the world from your home, but you have no social media. Anybody who happens across the peonies, they just happen to be in the right place at the right time. You make no promises.

Scott Budde: That's a pretty good description of it. I would describe it almost as that we inherited them when we purchased a home in Alna, which is on about 20 acres, about half of it wooded, half of it fields. And in the fields, a previous owner had planted about 400 peony bushes, which we then and now cultivate and sell. And you end up with them in one of two places, through a flower CSA by Daybreak Growers Alliance, which is out of Unity, or possibly, and this would be very occasionally, at Treats in Wiscasset.

Lisa Belisle: So as someone who, I've had lots of CSAs and we currently have one through Farmer Kev's, but we also do Daybreak, which shows up every Friday at Gather here in Yarmouth, and we actually do a flower CSA. And I must tell you that one of the greatest joys that I have in the world is when the flower CSA starts every year. And yours is a very specific peony CSA.

Scott Budde: We will be part of Daybreak. So if you picked up your flower CSA from Daybreak, you'd get a variety of flowers. And if it happened to be in, I'd say certainly mid-June through let's say the end of July, and you got a peony, that would be ours, probably mixed in with lots of others. And they have a great design sense. So you'd probably get a wonderful selection, and if it's a peony, it'd probably come from us.

Lisa Belisle: And Scott, for those people who keep throwing around CSA, CSA, what is a CSA, by the way?

Scott Budde: Yeah, it's community supported agriculture. It's a way that people who are looking to buy either local farm products or flowers, for example, can pay for them in advance and then get a share of the output of that farm over time over the summer. There are CSAs that operate in the fall and the winter. And particularly from my perspective, where I've done a lot of financing work with small farms and food businesses, it's helpful for them because they're getting cash upfront. So it reduces, at a time when they're spending money on seed and fertilizer and fuel and whatever, this brings in money at the beginning of the season and allows them to sort of pay it back in kind with the CSA over time.

Lisa Belisle: Well, that leads us very nicely into your quote day job, which is actually as a financial services executive. So I want to hear about that. Tell me about the work that you've been doing really now for more than a decade.

Scott Budde: Well, I came to Maine to start a credit union, and that was a very long process, as you can imagine, creating a regulated financial institution. And that started with Maine Harvest Federal Credit Union, which opened in October of 2019. Our first loan, interestingly, was made the week of lockdown in COVID, and COVID was a very difficult time for starting a new financial institution. And we're now part of a larger credit union, which is Ancorum Credit Union in Bath. It recently changed its name from Five County Credit Union. And within Ancorum, we operate as a specialized department that focuses on lending to small farms and food businesses. So that mission and the money that was raised to support that is all still alive and well and doing quite well within this larger credit union.

Lisa Belisle: How does one get into this business? You said you came to Maine to start a credit union, but walk me backwards to what you were interested in professionally that brought you here.

Scott Budde: Well, I'd spent my entire career prior to that also in financial services, in pretty mainstream commercial banking, some bank consulting. And then the longest job I had was working for TIAA, now TIAA-Nuveen, which is a big pension and insurance company in New York whose core business is managing pension funds for people in higher education, private K through 12, nonprofits. And my entire career there, I was working in the investment area, and over time I ended up gravitating towards some of the firm's responsible investing strategies. These are investment strategies that are taking environmental or social or governance factors into account in the investment process, taking them into account explicitly. And I was raised by leftist academics in Amherst, Mass. And so up until this point in my career, I think my father, if he were still around, found it a little seedy. I was dealing with money, which to a good academic, particularly with a strong socialist bent, that would be a little bit seedy. He liked the ESG investing stuff, of course, and he used TIAA as part of his pension.

So I loved this part of my work, and in fact, of my 20 or so years at TIAA, about 10 of that was really with this focus. One of the programs that I most enjoyed, that I managed and helped expand, was one that focused on TIAA placing large deposits into community banks around the country that were operating in some underserved area, low income inner city neighborhoods, tribal lands, all sorts of underserved niches. And there's some fascinating financial institutions out there. And at one point we just got the idea of, well, what about if we looked for one of these sorts of community institutions, and that could include a credit union, focused on small scale sustainable agriculture, because it was a very rapidly, and still is, a rapidly growing segment of the ag world. It's very popular to TIAA's participants, to investors in general. It enjoys broad political support, left and across the political spectrum. And I at one point said, oh, I certainly can find an institution somewhere in the US that has this focus. And I didn't find one. There are a lot of great institutions that do it. Coastal Enterprises in Brunswick certainly does lending, but as a regulated deposit taking bank or credit union, there was nothing with that focus. And that's what led to an increasing obsession, and coming back to Maine, my wife and I went to school in Maine and she has some strong Maine roots. We were coming back a little bit, and it led to this credit union story.

Lisa Belisle: The Maine connection is one where you and I intersect, you and I and your wife, I guess, intersect, because Bowdoin College.

Scott Budde: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: And that is where you and your wife met.

Scott Budde: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I guess I'll even go back a little bit further. What drew you to Bowdoin?

Scott Budde: Oh boy, I'd love to say it was some really logical analytical decision, but it certainly wasn't. I grew up in Amherst. My dad was a professor at UMass. My great uncle was a professor at Amherst College. I think in the end I sort of wanted to go someplace that was like Amherst College that just wasn't in Amherst, and Bowdoin certainly looked like that. Even though I grew up in New England, shockingly, I was sucked into that whole visit-the-pretty-Maine-college-in-August thing, and thinking that it would, without realizing that it never actually looks like that when you're there, except for maybe two days at the end of May or something, you might get a little glimpse of that.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I think it's expecting a lot for a 17 through 19 year old to make any sort of decision that you could call rational, right? But isn't it almost always sort of a gut feeling as to where you end up going?

Scott Budde: And whenever I meet kids who seem like they're at the end of their rope from adults asking them about their plans, where are you going to go to school, what are you going to do, I'm like, really ask them how they came up with their life plans. And you'll find some very eclectic stories of how they ended up where they are, how they picked where they were going to school, what kind of careers they ended up in. So mine wasn't, it was really Amherst, but not in Amherst.

Lisa Belisle: I mean, Bowdoin, you're right. Bowdoin in August is very different than Bowdoin in January, which you and I both know. And actually January is probably not even the hardest part. I think it's more Bowdoin in March, when you're not on break and you're like, oh, it's pretty gray out here, not really great from a landscape standpoint. However, I would say at least my experience with Bowdoin is it is a lovely small school. It draws people from really around the globe. It's got nationally recognized professorial talent and teaching. It's got a great art museum. It certainly has a lot of things to offer that go beyond the mud in March.

Scott Budde: Absolutely. And I ended up, I'd done a lot of music certainly before I went to Bowdoin, and then it was an attraction of Bowdoin. And I worked at the summer music festival for a couple years, as did my wife, who was my boss for a while.

Lisa Belisle: Well, so let's talk about, so you met your wife at Bowdoin. And I think that's the other thing that a lot of times these small colleges are known for, is that you have two people who show up in the same place at the same time, you have a lot of shared interests, and then you end up together. I think Bowdoin in particular, you and I read the alumni magazine, and there seems to be a lot of that going on.

Scott Budde: Seems to be. I always wonder whether it's more than other places. It seems like it's more, but I don't know.

Lisa Belisle: Again, not promising a love match if people want to go there. And having been, actually I went to the Maine Summer Humanities program when I was, which no longer exists, but when I was a high school student, and it was in the summertime and we intersected with the Maine Summer Music Festival, and of course you've got the theater on campus, and so there are a lot of things that are creative and artistic. And as someone who is drawn to things that are creative, we haven't even started talking about that yet. You actually also have an art connection. You've commissioned art. You like one of our artists, Dietlind Vander Schaaf, among other Maine artists. So Bowdoin is probably a pretty good fit for that, because Bowdoin also does that.

Scott Budde: It certainly does. I think when I look at what, maybe like a lot of people, when I look back on college, I always wish, oh, maybe I should have done a wider range of things than I did. But one of the things that was outside of, well, my major was economics, not a surprising one at Bowdoin, and I did a lot of music, also not surprising. But the thing that I took at Bowdoin that was maybe surprisingly transformative was a year of architectural history. And those were the only courses I took in the art department. It was purely as a fluke. I didn't sort of think or know too much about what I was signing up for, and I think that led to quite a lot of interests later in life and all sorts of things, I would say including the art collecting.

Lisa Belisle: Talk to me about that. Architectural history, there's certainly an intersection with art and design, and I know that even in the questionnaire that we had sent to you, there's even a question of art versus craft. And so I love understanding where people are coming from when it comes to these things, like how they got to their own appreciation for something like art. But what is the connection for you between the architectural history course and what you now enjoy as someone who collects and commissions art?

Scott Budde: Boy, that is a very good question. Maybe if I back into it a little bit, the connection to Dietlind and her work, when we came to Maine, before we lived in Alna, we lived in Portland for quite a while, and we lived right on Monument Square. So just a fabulous place for roaming around. You're right next to the Maine College of Art, you're next to fabulous galleries, including the Portland Art Gallery. And so that put me just directly into an art world that I didn't expect. It wasn't why, I mean, there were lots of great reasons to move to Portland, it wasn't sort of right on the table, but as soon as we were there, that really took off in a way that, ironically, we lived in New York before that. I can't think of any particular gallery experiences I had in New York. We had works of art, I think, that we had maybe from our friends, but we didn't collect anything. We didn't hang out at openings or anything like that. And that changed quite a lot in Portland. It's not a direct Bowdoin connection. It's more of a Portland connection than anything. And then we went to a couple of receptions at the Portland Art Gallery, one of which had Dietlind's work. I think it might've been a gateway into art collecting. I'd had some experience, and I'm a bit of a map collector, but more old and antique maps than anything else, but it was seeing this one piece of Dietlind's and thinking, I've got to have that. And then that was maybe the beginning of the beginning, or the end, whatever.

Lisa Belisle: I appreciate your trying to put that into words and back into it, as you say. And having a familiarity with Dietlind's work, there is this interesting combination of color and layering but also lines and mark making, and there is almost a design element to it that for me... and then of course you have the little pieces of gold leaf that she adds on top. So there's a lot of things going on that I think contribute to making that a very powerful thing for me personally. But do you have a sense for when you looked at this piece and it became your sort of gateway art?

Scott Budde: There is something very engaging about the medium of encaustic painting, and then her style maybe on top of that, that I just found really compelling. I don't want to draw a false connection to the Bowdoin architectural thing, but there certainly is an architectural and dimensional thing to it that I find really interesting and engaging. It is surprisingly dimensional for being still not sculpture, right? Sculpture is kind of inherently dimensional. But it's surprisingly dimensional for still being a painting that is more or less two dimensional that you're going to hang on your wall. And there was something about that that I just thought was really engaging. And that also led to recently talking to her about commissioning something through the gallery, which is never something... In New York, I think the gallery scene in New York would just have been too intimidating for me even if I had been drawn to it, which I wasn't particularly. I also had a very active job. I was traveling a lot. There were a lot of other things going on. But in Portland, where I had more time, I could be much more engaged with it, and then it led to this idea that you could commission something, which I certainly never would have in a million years thought about, walking into a gallery and talking to someone and saying, oh, could I commission something? And I think that is maybe a great untold story of the art world, that you can commission things from people. And that could be anything. I mean, Dietlind's work, she'll work with people on commissions, but it could be walking into an amazing potter's studio and just saying, you know, I really like this plate over here, but what about in that glaze, or with this? And we've done that, and people can say no, and they do occasionally say, no, that's not something I do. But a lot of times they're thrilled to do it. And artists are thrilled to talk about their work and where it could go and that sort of thing.

The other time I've done it in a big way, other than with Dietlind, was with a weaver in Bath, Hector Jaeger, whose work, like Dietlind's work, has a geometric... there are geometric components. His is quite geometric. It's flat weaving with all his yarn that he's dyed himself in a, I will say, infinite color range, and with very geometric block patterns, quite modern. I was drawn to it very similarly as to some of Dietlind's work, and someone who was completely open to doing a commission. And I think for commissions, if it's work that you're drawn to, then just let them run with it. And for Dietlind, it was the inspiration of a Maine lake in the summertime. Just go take a look, see what you think and see where that takes you. And for Hector, it was blueberry barrens in the fall, which I think is just one of the great spectacular natural sites in Maine. I don't think there's anything like it anywhere in the world, that type of color at that point in time in the year. And Hector Jaeger took that and made a rug out of it. It's very geometric. I don't think you'd necessarily look at it and say, oh, it's blueberries in Maine, because it's so geometric. But if you knew blueberries in Maine and you saw that rug, you'd be like, oh yes, that's it, in terms of the color patterns and how they work together.

Lisa Belisle: So you've brought forward a few things about the commissioning process that I think are important to underscore, perhaps verbally, and that is, one, that some artists are delighted to do commissions and other artists, that's just not what they do, and either is fine. It's always worth asking, because you're absolutely right. Somebody might be like, well, I've never done one, but I'll try it. Somebody else may be like, oh, I love commissions, sure, no problem. And I also think that it takes the right kind of grouping of people to do the commission. If you are somebody who has a visual vocabulary and somewhat of a design sense and an aesthetic, to be able to bring that to an artist I think is really helpful, at least just from my 10,000 foot observation. So when you're able to talk about the geometricity of something and you're able to have that conversation with somebody like Hector or Dietlind, it seems like it would be a more successful way of approaching commissioning than, can you just change that mark to blue?

Scott Budde: I think that sort of discussion, they both were completely into having. Dietlind certainly, in both cases, I definitely didn't go down the route of trying to prescribe what I wanted. I just had one idea, and then I found their work both so compelling that I just didn't feel like there was anything I would add to it beyond just saying, here's an idea. Well, okay, Hector works in specific sizes of rugs. He's working with a loom that's 60 inches. He's weaving largely at that width, and then he likes certain proportions. So there were only a couple size options, so there was that. Dietlind's generally working with square formats, there were a couple square sizes, but beyond that, I said 30 by 30, just fine. And then stop by, take a look. And I said, stop by without me. I don't want to be sitting there saying, oh, good, at those rocks over there. She's clearly got a good eye for things. Just having her stand there and look at whatever she wants to look at was perfect.

Lisa Belisle: And I think that that's the other piece that seems to be more successful when we talk about commissions, is the trust, that you're not asking them to do a... well, I guess some people could be. They could be like, I have a purple couch, can you create an orange piece that could go over it? But that's not what you're talking about. You're like, I like this person's work, I have this sense, here's some blueberry barrens, here's a lake, this is what I'm hoping to capture, do you feel like this is something that you could do? And then trusting that the artist has the capability and sort of the background and the craft that they're able to capture what you're hoping to have captured.

Scott Budde: Yeah. And I think that they were both artists that had a pretty established body of work and they are clearly professional artists. So there's no question about their desire and willingness to work in the formats that they're working in. And then it's not redesigning the kitchen where you're making all these specific decisions, and I just wouldn't want it to be, because I couldn't imagine that I would come up with something better. I certainly wouldn't. And I also just wanted this surprise. Both asked if I wanted to see sketches or have some communication in between times, and I think Dietlind did two works simultaneously with a similar theme and I could pick, but I declined any other interim stuff. I've seen their studios, I've seen where they've worked, but I just felt it kind of counterproductive to be sitting there saying, what about this, what about that?

Lisa Belisle: I've spoken to so many artists and also done studio visits and interacted with them, and for me it does come back to, there are things that artists know how to do with the materials that they have and the skills that they've worked on over the years that I have no conception of. So for me, if I were to say, well, take some cadmium orange and put a little dot over there and make a sun out of it, for me, it seems sort of beside the point. Why would you go in and try to suggest that? It's kind of like saying to a neurosurgeon, well, don't forget to chop off that part of the brain, because... So I love that it's an interactive process, but for you it really is, I've seen what you do and I want to work with you on this, but you need to be able to do your thing with what you know how to do.

Scott Budde: Right. Yeah, exactly.

Lisa Belisle: So people who aren't from Maine and haven't seen the blueberry barrens, how would you describe them in the fall? Because I think most people think of blueberries and they think blue, but you and I know that that's not what the blueberry barrens look like in the fall.

Scott Budde: Well, so these are wild berries, or what Mainers would call low bush berries, that are growing... they don't tend to grow very far south of Maine, and they don't grow much further south, and even central Maine, they tend to be northern, and they're growing on very rocky areas that have very poor soil by conventional soil standards. And after they're harvested, the leaves turn a just wild range of pinks and purples. Maybe like you might see if you saw that really spectacular sugar maple that occasionally in the right type of fall gets into those purples and reds and maybe even some pinks. Blueberry barrens are that on steroids, and they're playing out over these often just spectacular landscapes. They're relatively barren hills, because that's where the berries are growing. They're not in the woods. So these large, relatively barren looking landscapes that are very rocky. So you've got all that wonderful gray granite with all of its flecks and colors within it, and then this just really vibrant color. And prior to that in the year they aren't particularly... they're pretty, but they're just nice little low green plants that have some nice berries and a cute little flower here and there in the spring, and that's it. But then in the fall, just all hell breaks loose on the color front.

I'd never seen pictures of this. I didn't see it until just driving in Maine. And then when I came to Maine, I did a lot of interviewing of small farms and food businesses all over the state, way up in the county, right down to the tip of Washington County facing Canada, right down to York, all over the state. And it was then that I really saw them in the fall, and it was just mesmerizing.

Lisa Belisle: Thank you for describing that. A really nice job actually, because I've seen the blueberry barrens, I don't know that I could have done the description you've just given, because I think it's something you kind of have to see.

Scott Budde: In New England, other than if you have a pretty fall and you get a lot of color, you don't usually see these kind of vibrant purples and reds. You might in peonies, you might see bits of flowers during the summer, you might see bits of it, but you don't see it on a massive scale. Leaves turning in the fall, you can see it a bit. And like I said, occasionally you'd find these sugar maples that would burst out in some of these colors, but to see it on this scale, it was kind of thinking, how could I live near this and not have known about it?

Lisa Belisle: Well, I, like you, did not know that this was the case. And actually having lived in Maine, other than going away for medical school and other medical training, I lived in Maine, but also just was very sort of head down, take care of my career, take care of my family, take care of my kids. So when I first saw the blueberry barrens, it was incredible actually. And it's a lot like the rest of Maine honestly. When I was doing writing for the Maine Media Collective and doing work with that organization and going all over the state, it's such a different experience, because what you can see in Portland is really different than what you see in Machiasport, or when you go up to northern Maine, and there's so many different feels to the entirety of the state. And so I love that this drew you to it and it stayed with you even though it wasn't something that you had seen at Bowdoin, like you were just open to it.

Scott Budde: No, I had no exposure to it. I'm trying to think, when I was at Bowdoin, I had a lot of friends who were from Maine at Bowdoin, not surprisingly. And at that time, whenever I would suggest that we would go home with them, say on a break or something, they would always want to get out of Dodge. One of my best friends always lived on MDI, and I'd be like, why don't we go there? We're right next to Acadia. My dad will make me work, was one frequent. My dad will make me work, it's boring. And sometimes this would lead to this just crazy drive. We would drive from Brunswick to Amherst, which is basically the same place. They're very similar sorts of towns. It would take us five hours to get to Amherst and we're driving out of Maine even when there was plenty to see. But for me, I was just very thankful for these interviews, these research interviews. The initial formation of this credit union was just doing a lot of research around the business models of these types of farms and food businesses and what their needs were and aspirations, and trying to build that into a business plan for a financial institution. And that just brought me all over the state in a way that very few people would have that real privilege to be able to go out and do. And it brought me the blueberry barrens, through an interview with blueberry farmers.

Lisa Belisle: One of the things that I am really enjoying about our conversation today is, yes, you had the Maine Summer Music Festival, yes, you had this sort of creative interest while at Bowdoin, but ultimately you are an economics major and you went into financial services, and all of these things have sort of played into where you stand today, which is numbers and dollars and art and people and all the ways that these connect with one another. And that at no point did you say, well, of course I can't like art, I'm an economist or whatever. I know you weren't an economist, but you know what I'm saying. I think some people, they believe that you have to go in one direction or another. You like art or you like money.

Scott Budde: To me, I think that that's one of the absolute best things about being in Maine, is that there is an ability to cross all sorts of boundaries that you don't cross in New York. And it's still a relatively small state where you're much more easily connected to people. It's not in the art world, but I know politically, I started working on the project when I was in New York, and I can tell you, Chuck Schumer just didn't care about what I was working on. In Maine, I've met all of our DC delegation. They've all listened to my pitch, three out of four of the DC folks came to our opening, the governor came. So we had that connection, that was a connection that I would never have. Also, I've probably done more musically in Maine than I did in New York. And some of that's the timing of my career. And then the art world, like I said, I just wasn't waltzing into... you don't just sort of show up in the New York gallery scene. I just found it somewhere between intimidating and obnoxious, and that's just not what it is in Maine. So I think there's just the ability in Maine to craft, to create a life that's just a much wider range of activities than you can other places. Even though the job I had in New York was phenomenal. It was a phenomenal opportunity that wouldn't exist other places. It wouldn't have existed in Maine, so I was very thankful for that. I remember when I got my business card, first business card in Maine, the credit union project was sponsored jointly by MOFGA, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, the folks running the Common Ground Country Fair, and Maine Farmland Trust. So we raised our own money, but we were kind of under their auspices and we had an advisory committee of their people. So I created this business card that was quite complicated. Graphically it was not successful, I would say, because I had these multiple logos, I had this kind of weird title because we weren't our own entity yet. We were something else, we were a combination of things. And I remember I took it to the printer, I can't remember which one in Portland, and he's looking at it and he's trying to diplomatically tell me, this business card is just not very well designed. But what he said was, why don't you just add snow removal to your title? And it was a very interesting Maine comment of, well, in the end, everybody does a bit of snow removal, right? And a comment on these jobs that are combining lots of different lives, that are combining lots of different elements together. I do a lot of snow removal. I didn't add it to the card.

Lisa Belisle: I think that's, as you said, a very Maine comment.

Scott Budde: I didn't fully appreciate it. I think I somewhat appreciated it, and now I think I really get it.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. Well, Scott, it has been truly a pleasure to have this conversation with you today. I think you've just described this idea of scale that ends up being very important to what we've been saying. You see the large scale blueberry barrens and you're just impressed by the vastness of the color and the beauty, but also the small scale that Maine has to offer creates this accessibility and this ability to actually... I love this idea of crafting one's life that you've...

Scott Budde: Just because of these opportunities to combine things that you might not be able to do other places.

Lisa Belisle: Like peonies.

Scott Budde: Yeah, exactly.

Lisa Belisle: Bringing us back to the thing that we started with. So I hope that you will join us at an upcoming Portland Art Gallery opening again, even though I know you live up in Alna and maybe you can't do it during peony season, but maybe during one of the other upcoming months, we'll be able to draw you back down to the big city again.

Scott Budde: Absolutely. Dietlind and I will come up with a time when she's there too.

Lisa Belisle: Okay. That sounds good. I've been speaking with Scott Budde. He is a financial services executive, an art collector, an art commissioner. He is apparently a peony farmer, a gentleman farmer, we'll say, of sorts, along with his wife. And it's really been a pleasure to connect on all of these different topics. So I'm hoping that we will be able to bring him back to visit with Dietlind and our other artists at the Portland Art Gallery in Portland. You can go to our openings on the first Thursday of every month. For today, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. You've been listening to or watching Radio Maine, sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery. We explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit with our wonderful Maine connected individuals. Today it has been Scott Budde, another Bowdoin College graduate brought to our studio. It's been a true pleasure. Thank you so much for coming in.

Scott Budde: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.