Gordon Onslow-Ford

Gordon Max Onslow Ford Trust, Inverness, California

Oakland Museum of Art, Gordon Onslow Ford Retrospective, 1977

Good condition. Unlined, but on a new stretcher. Slightly thinly painted in a few areas. Under UV, a number of strokes of inpainting in the dark pigment in lower right to address some cracks and small losses which are visible to the naked eye. 5-10 other small spots scattered elsewhere, otherwise fine.
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Born in England in 1912 to a family of artists, Gordon Onslow Ford began painting land and seascapes at an early age. In 1937, he moved to Paris to pursue painting full-time.

In 1938, Gordon Onslow Ford was invited by André Breton to join the Surrealists. He attended Surrealist meetings at Café deux Magots where he was introduced to Yves Tanguy, Esteban Francés, Wolfgang Paalen, Victor Brauner and Pierre Mabille.  His passion for art led him to collect paintings and he frequently visited the studios of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Giorgio de Chirico.

Like many of the Surrealists who fled Europe during the war, Mr. Onslow Ford left France upon invitation from the Society for the Preservation of European Culture to join the Surrealists in New York. Mr. Onslow Ford gave a series of lectures on Surrealism and automatism at the New School for Social Research on Surrealism, and organized four important Surrealist shows in 1941.

That same year he and his wife, Jacqueline Johnson, left New York to join with their Surrealist friends in Mexico. There they bought a large mill in a remote village, Erongaricuaro, which was populated by the Tarascan Indians and located on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro. They set up a Surrealist colony, which had a constant flow of visitors over a six-year period including Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Remedios Varo, Esteban Francés, Eva Sulzer, Alice Rahon, Pierre Mabille, Benjamin Péret and the poet César Moro.

Gordon Onslow Ford created many beautiful works while in Mexico, exploring what he later called "the inner worlds".  The simplicity of living with the Trascan Indians and the volcanic landscape deeply influenced his paintings.  The personages in his paintings transformed into characters made of lines and colors separated into the complex background of what he called later "a reveal."  These poetic paintings are similar to a love story, depicting a journey of the painter moving from one inscape to the next.

In 1947 Onslow Ford and his wife Jacqueline moved to the San Francisco Bay area where he had his first retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1948). He became a major art world figure in the Bay Area involved with the creation of Dynaton exhibition with his fellow painters and friends Wolfgang Paalen and Lee Mullican.

Soon he was introduced to the philosophy of Zen and Japanese calligraphy. He acquired his studio on the Ferryboat Vallejo, in Sausalito. In the ten years of painting on the boat, the Vallejo became a historical landmark for artists, philosophers and poets.

In 1959 he moved North of San Francisco to the small town of Inverness, where he built a home and several studios. Surrounded by a pristine, coastal landscape he painted with discipline and passion, continuing to explore the inner worlds until his death in 2003.  He wrote three books: Painting in the Instant (1964); Creation (1978) and Once Upon a Time (1999).

The current work represents a compilation of several years of work, transforming the earlier Surrealist inscapes into a new language that depicts the relationship with the earth and indigenous ways of knowing.  In this period Onslow Ford freed lines from forms and used colors as the accent of the line.  The Parliament of Space Makers is a meeting of feminine and masculine energy ; male personages populate the left of the composition; a female personage is visible to the right while the center elements marry the two sides together. 
Parliament of Space Makers is the conference of humanity coming together in creation.  In this painting as well as for most other works created during this period of his oeuvre, the in-depth communication of the personages is evidenced through lines.

Fig 1 Jacqueline and Gordon Onslow Ford, Remedios Varo and César Moro, El Molino, Erongarícuaro, Mexico, 1946, photograph by Elisabeth Onslow Ford Rouslin