John Ferren was an American painter whose abstractions were influenced by both Wassily Kandinsky and Zen Buddhism. Composed of floating forms within backdrops of flat color, Ferren’s paintings allude to architecture, still life, and landscape, while still remaining vague. “I placed my hand on a tree trunk [and] instantaneously felt that every element of the landscape was alive—the light, air, ground and trees,” he once wrote. “All were interrelated, living the same life and (this is important in my art) their forms were all interchangeable.” Born on October 17, 1905 in Pendleton, OR, he moved to San Francisco as a young man, where he briefly attended the California School of Fine Arts and apprenticed with...