As Peter Blume struggled with the commission for The Rock (also in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago) his health deteriorated and he traveled to Key West, Florida, during the winter of 1940 to recuperate. Buoy was one of three works he completed upon his return to Pennsylvania. Blume spoke of the buoys he viewed in Florida:

They’d put out these bright red balls, and inside of three or four weeks they’d be covered with . . . all sorts of odd growths . . . I watched them stripping this stuff off and getting to the red thing again . . . I saw these balls, great big buoys, as a form of the earth and the laceration down to the red thing as a sort of bleeding world going on.