Gordon Onslow Ford; painter (last of the Parisian Surrealists)
Hyfler/Rosner
SOURCE: SF Chronicle Staff Writer
BYLINE: Jesse Hamlin
Gordon Onslow Ford, an artist whose mystical abstract paintings sought to
express the "inner worlds" beyond the visible one, died Sunday at his
Inverness home of a stroke. He was 90.
The last surviving painter from the Parisian Surrealists circle of the
1930s, Mr. Onslow Ford lived and worked in serene isolation in the West
Marin hills since the 1950s, painting kinetic canvases full of vibrating
circles, dots and lines that alternately suggest the cosmic and the
microscopic.
Mr. Onslow Ford, whose work was widely exhibited in Bay Area museums and
galleries over the years, had reduced his visual vocabulary to three basic
elements after having an epiphany on Mount Tamalpais in 1951. Looking at the
landscape and sky -- the redwoods and hills and clouds - he saw that
"underlying all of this is circle, dot and line," he said. He spent the next
50 years exploring the possibilities of those forms in color-splashed,
multilayered paintings that hummed with energy.
Mr. Onslow Ford was born in Wendover, England, in 1912 into an artistic
family. His grandfather was the noted Victorian sculptor Edward Onslow Ford.
Mr. Onslow Ford, who began drawing at an early age, graduated from the Royal
Naval College and served as an officer in the British Navy for several years
before quitting to pursue art.
He moved to Paris in 1937 and studied with Fernand Leger. Mr. Onslow Ford
struck up a friendship with the Chilean artist Roberto Matta, who introduced
him to the Surrealist group that included Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy. He
officially joined the group, founded by the autocratic poet Andre Breton, in
1938.
Mr. Onslow Ford shared the Surrealists' interest in dreams and the
unconscious, and began making spontaneous paintings by pouring paint onto
canvas in a process called coulage, predating Jackson Pollock's drip
technique by a decade.
Leaving Paris before the Nazi invasion, along with many other artists, Mr.
Onslow Ford went to New York and gave a series of influential lectures on
Surrealism at the New School in 1941. After marrying poet Jacqueline Johnson
the same year, he went to Mexico to visit his painter friend Wolfgang Paalen
and ended up living and working there for six years.
In 1947, Mr. Onslow Ford came to the Bay Area, where Paalen had settled, and
the following year his paintings were shown at the San Francisco Museum of
Art. In San Francisco, Mr. Onslow Ford met the bohemian Greek artist Jean
Varda, and together they bought the old ferry boat Vallejo, docked in
Sausalito, and set up their studios there. The Vallejo became an artists'
hangout and the scene of colorful parties where socialites rubbed shoulders
with sculptors.
Mr. Onslow Ford, Paalen and painter Lee Mullican formed a group call
Dynaton - Greek for "possible" - and exhibited their mystically oriented
paintings together in 1951 at a San Francisco Museum of Art exhibition of
the same name.
Mr. Onslow Ford, who had quit the Surrealist movement in 1944, began to
explore "the world beyond dreams," he told The Chronicle last year. "Dreams
often have a relationship to what's happening in your life. Once you get
into the inner world, you get into a common land, a new experience,
something universal. A spiritual world."
In the late 1950s, Mr. Onslow Ford and his wife bought and settled on 400
acres in West Marin, where he found inspiration for his work in nature. The
Onslow Fords later gave most of the Bishop Pine Reserve to the Nature
Conservancy. Mrs. Onslow Ford died in 1978.
"I've been tremendously influenced by these woods," said Mr. Onslow Ford.
"These trees, everything you see, is inside me and with me when I paint."
In addition to painting, Mr. Onslow Ford also wrote two books on art,
"Creation" and "Painting in the Instant."
He is survived by a sister, Elizabeth Onslow Ford Rouslin, and a nephew, Max
Rouslin, both of North Carolina. Plans for a memorial service are pending.