John Ferren

John Millard Ferren was a leader in the development of abstract art in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Ferren grew up in San Francisco and Los Angeles and had an early interest in art. After a brief stint as an engineer, he apprenticed himself to an Italian stonecutter and learned to carve ornamental blocks for buildings and decorative tombstones. Ferren went to Paris in 1929 and studied at the Sorbonne university as well as at two private art schools, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Colarossi. He returned only briefly to the United States, resuming work in Paris in 1931 and remaining until 1938.

During this longer period in Paris, Ferren took up painting and studied experimental printmaking and established himself as an innovator of geometric abstraction. He associated with numerous important avant-garde artists, including Spanish artist Joan Miró (1893-1983), who were experimenting with biomorphic forms and the inspiration of dreams and the inspiration of children's art in their rejection of conventional representation. He also worked with British printmaker Stanley William Hayter at his workshop known as Atelier 17. Around 1935, Ferren began adapting Hayter's experimental creation of poured plaster "prints" pulled from engraved copplerplates; Ferren carved and painted these "prints" to create relief sculptures.

Ferren's work in abstraction continued into the early 1950s, when he used delicate washes of pale color on canvases that were unprimed (that is, unprepared with a "ground" to prevent oil paint from seeping into the canvas surface). As the decade progressed, however, Ferren returned to representation at a time when many younger American artists were drawn to the intuitive, large-scale mode known as abstract expressionism. Nonetheless, his painting remained primarily dedicated to abstract order and color relationships.