John Little had multi-disciplinary outlets in the arts, having run a successful textile design company and been a student of operatic singing. Little, who attended the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and worked under George Grosz at the Art Students League, began to seriously paint abstraction after studying with Hans Hofmann, through whom he also became a close friend of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. While Little’s early style had a linear quality inspired by Surrealist automatism, his later works featured thick impasto and gestural brushstrokes. He explained: “I was trying to get away from the drawing, letting form and color carry the idea rather than the line.” Though known best for painting, Little also made mixed-media collages and sculptures from driftwood and debris; the latter appeared in Hans Namuth’s 1955 film Image of the Sea.