William Buffett / “A Passion for New Orleans Jazz”
Nashville-based William Buffett took a classical route to becoming an accomplished artist. He was awarded a full tuition scholarship at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in the 1950s and then began his travels as an artist to visit art museums around the country, picking up a Huntington Hartford Foundation Fellowship for painting along the way. In the early 1960s, he was drawn to New Orleans by the music. He went there to make studies of musicians at work. Throughout the decade, he painted portraits, worked as a sculptor, learned screen printing and presented solo art shows. In the 1970s he traveled—to NYC, to art museums in Europe, and to Japan, China, Thailand and Singapore, painting and sketching along the way. In the 1980s he began producing editions of serigraphs, which were published and enjoyed commercial success from widely distributed reproductions of both his serigraphs and paintings.
Buffett has lived in Nashville in the last couple of decades, and among other projects has continued to develop a small body of work focused on the roots of New Orleans Jazz. In the 1990s, he showed some of these paintings at the former Carlton Wilkinson Gallery in Nashville. This current exhibit features some 15-20 pieces in a series that includes very large canvases as well as small sketches from which the larger works were built. The exhibit is being presented in cooperation with Richland Fine Art in Nashville, where his work is represented.
With his background of classical training and his interest in the style and substance of indigenous American music, this series of paintings highlights both the dignity and spirit of true original roots of jazz.
