John McLaughlin is seen in the USA as one of the pioneers of Minimal Art and Hard Edge Painting. He showed an interest in Asian art even as a young man, and traveled to China and Japan. During the war he worked for the American army’s Sino Intelligence arm in the Far East. McLaughlin did not start to paint until 1946, when he settled in Dana Point at the age of almost fifty. His thought and work continued to be powerfully influenced by his fascination with oriental art and culture. The painting #1 – 1962 acquired by the Daimler Art Collection, is one of a small group of works produced in the early 1960s that can be broadly defined as stripe pictures. Monochrome lines and stripes are distributed harmoniously across the picture surface. The presence of the colored stripes seems to be so calculated in relation to their extent that a rhythm is developed, stimulating the viewer to respond to the artist’s will and ‘contemplate’. The colors are reminiscent of his early paintings in which he used more energetic, more highly contrasting shades like yellow and red, which he abandoned almost completely later.