John Altoon

BIOGRAPHY

With energetic abstract expression, an aggressive personality, and reckless life style, John Altoon was a major presence in the 1950 and 60s art scene of Los Angeles that included Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz and Ed Moses. Artistically he became known for his oil paintings and his influence as an art instructor.

In the magazine "Art in America," February 1999, he was referred to, relative to that era, as "the baddest of the bad boys" [84], one who rode motorcycles at high speeds, drove cars blindfolded, and also suffered from schizophrenia. 

He grew up in Los Angeles and after high school graduation, served in the Navy as a radar technician in the Pacific during World War II. At the end of the war, he used the GI Bill to go to art school and lived and worked as a commercial illustrator in New York City. During this time, he also created large gestural paintings, as a result of his exposure to the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. Subsequently he spent a year in France and Spain before returning to his native Los Angeles in 1955.. 

His work is described as reductive in that he changed from an all over painted surfaces to floating shapes. In the 1960s, he began doing botanical and biomorphic forms, a theme that remained with him until his death. Some of the paint he applied with airbrush. He also did a series of pen and ink drawings called "Nightmares," that were expressions of erotic fantasies, and many watercolors that he exhibited with the California Water Color Society.

He died in Los Angeles. In 1997, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego had a retrospective of his work.

Sources: 
"Art in America", February 1999
 "California Watercolors, 1850-1970", Gordon McClelland and Jay Last