“He could do anything,” said the artist John Baldessari in 1992. “You know, there’s always the best student at school. He was the best student.” Baldessari was talking about Norman Zammitt, who made a big impression on him at Otis College, in Los Angeles. Born in 1931 in Toronto, Zammitt moved to California as a teenager. He began his artistic career by making minimalist sculptures, but discovered paint in the 1970s. Zammitt spent years creating what The New York Times recently called “chromatic investigations.” He painted horizontal lines of varying colors and thicknesses, applying acrylic to canvas using a mathematical approach. In the 1980s, Zammitt worked with mathematicians at the California Institute of Technology; they helped him use computer programs to make color charts and graphs of greater complexity. Zammitt died in 2007, and though not as well known as other members of the Light and Space Movement, the rigorous radiance of his work is sensational. —Jeanne Malle