During the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was difficult for young artists in the wake and shadow of early Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Rothko to adapt to the formal and at times metaphysical prescriptions for the new style. This misapprehension was compounded for John Altoon by the apparent split he saw between his own personal experience with illustration and drawing versus the demands of the art world to produce grand, self-sufficient, abstract works of art. Despite these difficulties, the academic experience and formal training of the artist in illustration and drawing as well as his albeit limited exposure to Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism in both Europe and New York in the early 1950s gave him a unique perspective. John Altoon brought back to the Los Angeles art scene an eclectic and academic, while personally expressive form of painterly abstraction.

John Altoon was able to adopt the more technical tenants of the new style, such as the emphasis on gesture and the process of application as well as the preference for an all-over, abstract, atmospheric space of canvas. At the time, the philosophy of Abstract Expressionism was that painting reduced the interaction and balance of its most essential components light, color and line. Furthermore, it was held that it could achieve purity as both a discipline and an art in which the artist is figured as a transcendent creator, whose work and process are dissociated entirely from the world. In contrast, this method finds no place in the work of John Altoon. The disinterest and detachment associated with modernist abstraction is displaced by the honest and intimate expression of the artist. The work of John Altoon is rooted in a location or in a milieux which is far from isolated in the progressive purification of socially alienated art. The idiosyncrasies of the works of John Altoon are not formal designs that effect a balance or harmony. The turbulence and imbalance of his compositions and process correspond directly to the intense personality of John Altoon and the vibrancy of his creative environment. Along with the other artists exhibiting at the Ferus Gallery such as Ed Kienholz, Richard Diebenkorn, and Sonia Gechtoff, the stylistic and formal as well as expressive progression of the works of John Altoon defy the standard art historical criteria by which abstraction is judged and qualified.

Part of the importance of a figure such as John Altoon to the Los Angeles art community of the 1950s was his introduction of the techniques of Abstract Expressionism at a time when academies were still far too conservative to teach the methods and philosophy of abstract expressionism. After his return to Los Angeles in 1956 from his sojourn in New York, Spain and Paris, the paintings of John Altoon begin to demonstrate his progressive construction of an individual, expressive, and abstract style. It is also at this time that John Altoon began teaching drawing at the Art Center College of Design. Despite the fact that his drawings in ink, pencil and gouache constitute a much larger part of his portfolio, the paintings of John Altoon throughout the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate a series of dramatic investigations into the formal, autobiographical, and erotic potential of painting.

By 1960, John Altoon had almost mastered the idea of a painting as a series of gestures in combination with more vibrant and contrasting coloring than the restricted palettes of East Coast abstraction and minimalism. The paintings of John Altoon produced between 1958-1960 exhibit a steady articulation of forms where representational drawing is minimized, but the calligraphic and textural aspect of drawing is retained. Before the more widely known figural and biomorphic paintings and drawings of the artist in the early and mid-1960s, in which figures are isolated in relation to both each other and a single-tone background, John Altoon used the entire field of the canvas as a means to and stage for personal expressions of urgency, movement, and immediacy. These all-over paintings were an attempt to accommodate both himself and his art to the vital new influences of the time. Throughout his struggle to intuitively create work using only a more technical understanding of the tenants of Abstract Expressionism, John Altoon grew cynical about the increasing schoolishness of his contemporaries.