Bill Buchman

Collective Z presents Infinite Oasis, a solo exhibition of paintings, works on paper and prints by Bill Buchman. Spanning six decades, from prints made in 1965 to canvases finished this year, it is the first solo exhibition in New York for Buchman, whose career has run from Cornell University in the 1960s to nearly twenty years of working and exhibiting in Europe, and back.

“Thought and expression in art have no limits. The realm of mind is an infinite oasis, where we can always stop for a drink.” The exhibition takes its title from Buchman’s own words, and the work bears them out: sixty years of a practice that has never settled into one manner, one medium or one country.

The exhibition begins where Buchman began, with the figure. The earliest works on view, an etching, a woodcut and a mixed-media work on paper from 1965 and 1966, come from his formative years at Cornell: faces pressed out of dark grounds, worked in a line that is already restless and searching. That line carries forward into a gouache from 2000 and a limited-edition figure print from 2002, where a body arrives in a few decisive strokes. Buchman has drawn from the model all his life, and his teaching of it became a book used in studios around the world.

In the large paintings of the past six years, the same line is let loose. Buchman, who trained as a jazz pianist as seriously as he trained as a painter, calls these works Visual Jazz. Blocks of color sit like chords, and an oil-stick line in cobalt, lime or yellow improvises across them: stated, picked up, bent, left open, returned to. Night Vision (2023) fills its canvas edge to edge; Beyond the Pale (2026) leaves a pale ground open and lets a single blue line wander across it. Nothing is tidied up afterward. The risk stays in.

Seen together, the six decades make one case. The line that first appeared under an etching needle in 1965 is the line now running in oil stick across a six-foot canvas. It has only grown freer.

Bill Buchman trained twice. As a teenager he studied painting and drawing with Victor D’Amico, the Museum of Modern Art’s longtime director of education, at the Institute of Modern Art in East Hampton, and with Fletcher Martin at the Albany Institute of Art. At Cornell University’s School of Fine Arts he studied with the Abstract Expressionist Robert Richenburg. He then trained as a jazz pianist, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the New England Conservatory in its Third Stream program under Ran Blake and Jaki Byard, before private study in Los Angeles with David Pacheco turned him fully back to the studio. Painting and music have stayed braided in his work ever since.

In 1981 Buchman moved to Europe, first to Amsterdam and Paris, then to Copenhagen, where he lived and worked for some sixteen years. Gallerihuset in Copenhagen represented him for eighteen years, showing his work almost annually from 1993 to 2012. He exhibited at the United States Embassy in Copenhagen (1998, 2000), at Art Copenhagen (2000, 2004), at Landskrona Konsthall in Sweden (1995) and at the Louise Rimington Gallery in England (1997), and his work is held in private and public collections in Denmark, Sweden, England and the United States.

Returning to the United States in 2001, he settled in Sarasota, Florida, and taught for many years at Ringling College’s Longboat Key Center for the Arts and at the Venice Art Center. A figure draftsman at heart, he is the author of Expressive Figure Drawing (Watson-Guptill, 2010), an instructional classic, and of five instructional films on figure drawing, abstraction and creativity, and he designed a signature line of sumi brushes and reed pens with Jerry’s Artarama. His work has been featured on NPR and in American Artist. Buchman now lives and works in New York City, where he still performs as a jazz pianist, and is one of Collective Z’s five inaugural roster artists.