John McLaughlin was a self-taught American painter known for his austere geometric abstractions based in the Zen Buddhist notion of the void. Employing precisely painted rectangular and gridded forms of beige, warm black, marigold yellow, and deep indigo, McLaughlin’s works intended to provoke a meditative state. “My purpose is to achieve the totally abstract,” he once reflected. “I want to communicate only to the extent that the painting will serve to induce or intensify the viewer’s natural desire for contemplation without the benefit of a guiding principle.” Born on May 21, 1898 in Sharon, MA, McLaughlin’s parents fostered his interest in Asian art throughout his childhood. Serving in World War I as a young man, he later lived with his wife in Japan during the mid-1930s. Returning to the United States three years later, McLaughlin and his wife opened a gallery in Boston that specialized in Japanese prints. Recruited as a Japanese translator in World War II, he began producing art full time after his service ended in 1946. Influenced by the paintings of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, as well as those of 16th-century Japanese painters, McLaughlin’s earliest mature works were abstractions. In 1952, the artist had his first solo exhibition at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles, later gaining recognition as one of the preeminent artists in California, alongside Robert Irwin and Billy Al Bengston. McLaughlin died on March 22, 1976 in Dana Point, CA. In 2016, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened a long overdue retrospective of his work titled “John McLaughlin: Total Abstraction.” Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, among others.