Gordon Onslow Ford (British, 1912–2003) was the youngest recruit to the pre-World War II, Paris-based Surrealist group. He was brought to the United States in 1940 by the Committee to Preserve European Culture. To fulfill obligations to this organization, he delivered a series of highly influential lectures on Surrealism at the New School for Social Research in New York in the spring of 1941. Attended by younger American artists, as well as by some of his fellow refugees, these lectures offered not only interpretations of Surrealist paintings, but also a vision of new possibilities in art, and presented an open challenge for artists to pursue personal experiment in order to bring about a revolution in consciousness. Jimmy Ernst (American/German, 1920–1984), who was in the audience, was taken by the new possibilities “for a further horizon that implied individualism.” Other artists in attendance included Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, William Baziotes, and Jackson Pollock.

Six months after his landmark talks, Onslow Ford left New York for a remote Mexican village where he remained for six years. In the spring of 1947, Onslow Ford and his family crossed the Mexican border, eventually settling in San Francisco.

While in San Francisco, Onslow Ford and fellow artists Wolfgang Paalen (Austrian/Mexican, 1907–1959) and Lee Mullican (American, 1919–1998) formed the group Dynaton, and were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1951.

After moving out of the center of San Francisco, to Mill Valley, the artist became inspired by the landscape of the California countryside. This gave rise to a new and very different phase in his work. Onslow Ford used this experience to bring his paintings closer to an approximation of matter as energy. These works are characterized by dense alignments of dark verticals and shafts of white, interspersed with brightly colored, concentric circles that appear to revolve and give the effect of light as energy. For him this was an expression of the “great spaces of the mind” that he would explore in painting for the rest of his life.

The artist has had several retrospectives in the United States and around the world, and his paintings are in the collections of many major institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Tate Britain, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.