Gordon Onslow Ford, 90, Last of Parisian Surrealist painters
Hoodude
November 18, 2003
http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story.jsp?sectionid=1274&storyid=507873
GORDON Onslow Ford, the last surviving painter of a 1930s group of
Surrealist painters led by Andre Breton, has died at his Inverness
home. He was 90.
Onslow Ford died on Sunday of a stroke, according to Deborah Gorman,
who runs the artist's hometown gallery.
Onslow Ford's colour-drenched circle, line and dot compositions sought
to uncover what he called the "inner worlds" - levels of consciousness
beyond the personal, visible realm.
He spent the last 50 years or so of his life working in isolation in
the hills of Marin County, where he lived with his wife, poet
Jacqueline Johnson.
Born in 1912 in Wendover, England, Onslow Ford graduated from the
Royal Naval College and served briefly in the British Navy before
deciding to study painting in Paris in 1937.
He studied briefly with French painter Fernand Leger before meeting
Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, who became his lifelong
friend.
Matta later introduced him to a Surrealist group that included Max
Ernst and Yves Tanguy. Onslow Ford officially joined the group, led by
Breton, in 1938.
During that time, Onslow Ford developed a technique of spontaneously
pouring paint onto canvas, predating by a decade Jackson Pollock's
drip technique.
Onslow Ford met and married Johnson while giving a series of lectures
at New York's New School in 1941.
They moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1947, where Onslow Ford
and painters Wolfgang Paalen and Lee Mullican formed the group
Dynaton, named after the Greek word for "possible". At that time he
began exploring mystically oriented paintings, drawn from his study of
Zen Buddhism.
Onslow Ford is survived by his sister, Elizabeth Onslow Ford Rouslin,
and a nephew, Max Rouslin, both of North Carolina. Johnson died in
1978.