John Harvey McCracken died last Friday. He was a contemporary artist who lived and worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico and New York. As one of the founding artists of the Minimalist movement on the West Coast, John McCracken helped create a Los Angeles aesthetic in sculpture with his lacquered monochromatic forms.
He was extensively exhibited throughout the U.S. and elsewhere. He was born in Berkely, California in in 1934. Today, ARTKABINETT art collector social network honors this giant of modernism.
McCracken developed his earliest sculptural work while studying painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts between 1957 to 1965.
While experimenting with increasingly three-dimensional canvases, the artist began to produce objects made with industrial techniques and materials, including plywood, sprayed lacquer, and pigmented resin, creating the highly-reflective, smooth surfaces that has gained him international recognition. 
He applied similar techniques which are used in surfboard construction - pervasive in his Southern California environment - to his artistic production.
McCracken is part of the Light and Space movement which includes James Turrell, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin and others. In interviews, however, he usually cited his greatest influences as the color fields of the Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman and Minimalists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre.
The early objects by John McCracken are derived from company logos such as the Chevron corporation logo. His sculptures deal with the interrelationships existing between the material world and design.
In 1966, young McCracken generated his signature sculptural form: the plank, a narrow, monochromatic, rectangular board format that leans at an angle against the wall (the site of painting) while simultaneously entering into the three-dimensional realm and physical space of the viewer.
He conceived the plank idea in a period when artists across the stylistic spectrum were combining aspects of painting and sculpture in their work and many were experimenting with sleek, impersonal surfaces.
As the artist notes, "I see the plank as existing between two worlds, the floor representing the physical world of standing objects, trees, cars, buildings, [and] human bodies, ... and the wall representing the world of the imagination, illusionist painting space, [and] human mental space." 
Theses sculptures consist of plywood forms coated with fiberglass and layers of polyester resin. While the polished resin surface recalls the aesthetic of 1960s southern California surfboard and Kustom Kar cultures, the title was drawn from advertising slogans in fashion magazines.
In addition to the planks, the artist also creates wall pieces and free-standing sculptures in varying geometrical shapes and sizes, ranging from smaller forms on pedestals to large-scale, outdoor structures in the shape of pyramids, ziggurats, tetrahedrons and occasionally crystals.
He worked in highly polished stainless steel and bronze and occasionally made work that in effect sliced the planks into thin, repeating elements that leaned against the wall in rows.
For McCracken, color is also used as "material." Bold solid colors with their highly polished finish reflect the unique California light or mirror the observer in a way that takes the work into another dimension. His palette included bubble-gum pink, lemon yellow, deep sapphire and ebony, usually applied as a monochrome.
Sometimes an application of multiple colors marbleizes or runs down the sculpture's surface, like a molten lava flow. McCracken typically makes each resin or lacquer work by hand rather than using industrial fabrication. Each is hand-made by McCracken himself, who carefully paints them. 
The monochrome surfaces are sanded and polished many times to such a degree of reflectiveness that they seem translucent.
He also made objects of softly stained wood or, in recent years, highly polished bronze and reflective stainless steel.
In 2010, for example, he created various sculptures that are polished to produce such a high degree of reflectivity that they simultaneously activate their surroundings and seem entirely camouflaged.
In 1971-72 he made a rarely seen series of paintings based on Hindu and Buddhist mandalas, first shown at Castello di Rivoli in 2011.
McCracken is represented by David Zwirner, New York.
