Craig Kauffman graduated from Eagle Rock High School with Walter Hopps. He was one of the original artists associated with L.A.’s infamous Ferus Gallery in the late 1950s and ’60s, Kauffman has yo-yoed between the more traditional concerns of abstract painting and making the vacuum-formed plastic wall reliefs that earned him membership in L.A.’s so-called Finish Fetish school. Dissimilar on the surface, both aspects of his work actually reflect a lifelong interest in the properties of light and the aesthetics of the Far East.