Bill Buchman: Infinite Oasis

Sixty years of Bill Buchman's improvising line, from 1960s etchings and woodcuts to the large acrylic and oil-stick canvases he calls Visual Jazz. About Bill Buchman has spent sixty years following a single line. This exhibition follows it with him, from the first etching plate to the newest canvas. Infinite Oasis brings together eighteen works made between 1965 and 2026. The earliest are prints and a work on paper from Buchman's years at Cornell, where he studied with the Abstract Expressionist Robert Richenburg. The Wise Guy and Moontide and the woodcut Eclipse are portraits held inside dense, nocturnal grounds, and the line in them is already doing more than describing. It hatches, coils and crowds the edges, as if each face were being drawn and improvised at once. Buchman has drawn from the model all his life, and that discipline is the hinge of the show. Nureyev's Departure stages the body as theater; Nude Dimension (2002) sets it down in a handful of strokes. In The Queen and In and Out (both 2020), the figure begins to give itself up to the color around it. From there the paintings open out. The large canvases of the past three years, in acrylic and oil stick, are what Buchman calls Visual Jazz. In Night Vision and Ecology of Light (both 2023), color is packed edge to edge in short, struck blocks, and a bright oil-stick line runs through them like a solo through a crowded rhythm section. The diptychs Late Gig and Thou Cool (2025) take their titles from the bandstand. This year the field clears: Beyond the Pale and Game of Tones leave a pale ground open and let a few shapes and one wandering line carry the whole surface, while Achilles and Odysseus pull everything into a single spinning core. The small watercolor Chautauqua Etude 1 holds the same impulse at the scale of a sheet of paper. Nothing in these paintings is tidied up afterward. The risk stays in, and so does the pleasure. "Thought and expression in art have no limits," Buchman says. "The realm of mind is an infinite oasis, where we can always stop for a drink." Sixty years on, the line has not stopped moving. Read more Toggle Prints Mixed media Painting Drawing