Born in England in 1912 to a family of artists, Gordon Onslow Ford began painting at an early age. His grandfather, Edward Onslow Ford, was a renowned Victorian sculptor and his aunt, Enid Widdrington, exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy of London. Following the death of his father at age 14, he was sent to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. The ocean affected him deeply and his early works depicted ocean scenes. The metaphor of taking a "voyage" later became an important aspect of his paintings.

While in the Navy, Onslow Ford visited Paris several times. In 1937, he resigned as a naval officer and moved to Paris to pursue painting full time. He studied with André L'Hote for five weeks and studied with Fernand Léger for a short time. He continued visiting Léger, bringing his work to him often for critique. Soon he met the Chilean artist Roberto Matta. Matta was studying architecture with le Corbusier and was an accomplished draftsman, making small drawings on the side. Onslow Ford, with his keen sense of seeing, admired Matta's drawings as "the most exciting images" he had seen in Paris. He encouraged Matta to continue with his drawings, which eventually inspired Matta to shift his direction from architecture to painting.

Onslow Ford and Matta became close friends, meeting and traveling frequently. They developed an ongoing dialogue about their ideas on art and metaphysics. They were also inspired by seeing the 1937 exhibit of Mathematical Objects in Paris in which one aspect of the Mathematical Object is visible while another aspect is left to the imagination of the viewer.

In 1938, Onslow Ford joined the Surrealist group in Paris and attended their meetings in Café deux Magots and besides Matta he became friends with Pierre Mabille, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Esteban Francis, Wolfgang Paalen and Victor Brauner. His love of painting also led him to collect paintings and frequent visits to the studios of Picasso, Miró, de Chrico and André Masson.

In 1947, Onslow Ford moved to California, choosing the San Francisco Bay Area as the fertile soil where his new ideas would have a chance to grow. While in San Francisco he was invited to give a retrospective show at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1948). The title of the exhibit and the catalogue, Towards a New Subject in Painting, spoke to the fact that he was moving in a new direction in his art. While walking in Muir Woods near Mill Valley, California, he discovered lines, circles and dots as the primal root of art, conveying the "underlying ground of existence." Lines, circles and dots became the elements by which he could travel into deeper layers of consciousness.

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