EAST MEETS WEST IN COLOR THAT SINGS

Bill Buchman is a prolific artist whose expressive work draws on his extensive musical background as a schooled jazz pianist. Throughout his career he has explored the intersection between art and music, especially the connection between jazz improvisation and the act of painting and drawing. An intimate familiarity with what is meant by a harmony, melody, and a rhythm informs his every move with the brush. His abstractions have been characterized as “symphonies of space, form and color” and his figures as “lightning bursts of energy condensed into a fine line”. The works offer a playful space, bold and assertive, yet with an openness that invites viewers to enter in and imagine their own stories.

Bill says, “ I make art as a way to transcend everyday experience. My painting language is built around the idea of communicating harmony, optimism, joy and meaning through a fusion of painting and music. My aim is to make paintings that are inspirational and therapeutic. My art is based on a lifelong immersion in Zen painting, Jazz, 20th century Modernism and Dada. These have led me to the only place possible… to myself. It is from from here I paint the rhythms, melodies and harmonies of my body and spirit.”

New York artist Bill Buchman’s career spans more than 50 years as a painter, musician, educator and author. With many exhibitions to his credit, Bill’s art may be seen in private and public collections in the US, Denmark, Sweden, and England. A  New York State native, Bill grew up with an intense passion for the art displayed in the museums of New York City and started his art education as a teen in the early 60’s, studying painting and drawing with well-known teachers Victor D’Amico, at the Institute of Modern Art, East Hampton, NY, and Fletcher Martin, at the Albany Institute of Art, in Albany, NY. Later, he attended Cornell University, School of Fine Arts, studying with abstract expressionist Robert Richenburg and playing with the Mojos, a popular Ithaca rock band. Bill’s unshakeable optimism and a spiritual view of life have always been his keynotes and his adventurous nature and Zen approach to life have fueled many explorations and endeavors. In the soul-searching sixties Bill was playing in rock and blues bands in NYC and beyond as well as fighting forest fires in Alaska, doing street portraits and playing free jazz in Boulder, CO and much more, including attending, from beginning to end, the culminating event of that time, the Woodstock Festival. As that era drew to a resounding close, Bill, taking with him these rich formative experiences, entered the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC) and dove into the remarkable jazz milieu in Boston of that period, studying with piano greats Jaki Byard and Ran Blake and receiving an amazing musical education in NEC’s pioneering Third Stream Program and earning bachelor’s and master’s music degrees there. Active musical years in Boston, Cape Cod and Los Angeles followed playing with great musicians. In 1979 in LA, Bill had private studies with art teacher David Pacheco that revitalized Bill’s art aspirations. From that point, while continuing to play music, Bill made visual art his principal focus. In service of this goal, in 1981, he relocated to Europe, first in Amsterdam, then in Paris. After four years of European travel, research and continuous education, Bill settled in Copenhagen, Denmark and then worked, exhibited, and performed with success in Scandinavia for the next 16 years. In 2001 Bill moved to Sarasota, Florida where, in addition to painting, exhibiting and performing, he became an in-demand teacher of figure drawing, abstraction and creativity. Along with many years of teaching locally at the Ringling Longboat Key Center for the Arts and at the Venice Art Center, Bill travelled the US as an ambassador for Savoir Faire  (the leading purveyor of European art materials) giving workshops and seminars demonstrating his contemporary art-making approach incorporating musical composition ideation together with  Zen and Modernist techniques. He has made five instructional DVD’s on these subjects and written a popular and innovative book on drawing, “Expressive Figure Drawing” (Watson-Guptill/Random House 2010). Bill lives in New York City, where both he and his ceaseless artistic and musical activities, through exhibitions and performances, are thriving.

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