No one else's paintings look like those of Gordon Onslow Ford.

They appear abstract yet hint at cosmic references, with orb and starburst motifs like those in pop futurist wallpaper designs from the early '50s. In Onslow Ford's hands, though, these motifs look neither naive nor ironic. His pictures' sheer force of conviction may explain their inimitable air.

Onslow Ford is a legendary figure in the Bay Area. His lectures in Manhattan in the early '40s helped spread Surrealism's influence to the New York School.

In 1951 he, Wolfgang Paalen and Lee Mullican staged a landmark show of abstraction called "Dynaton" at the San Francisco Museum of Art (as SFMOMA was known then).

Since 1958, he has lived and worked deep in the hills of West Marin. Exhibitions of his work are rare and should not be missed, especially when they include pieces made 40-odd years apart.

Like the particle physicist who analyzes reality into a catalog of quantum phenomena, Onslow Ford has found a visual lexicon — line, circle and dot — that he believes cuts to the essence of being. "It is the underlying field of existence," he told an interviewer in 1996, "a possibility of evolution into the Great Spaces of the Mind."

Now in his late 80s, Onslow Ford has been pondering such possibilities since he joined the Surrealist group in Paris in the '30s, only to be expelled, like so many others, by its martinet founder Andre Breton.

Onslow Ford believes that his cluster of symbols makes a direct connection between the painting hand and typically obscure depths of consciousness.

His idea revises the Surrealist notion that "automatic" drawing or writing divulges unconscious thought freely. They believed in unguided improvisation; he believes that his notation uniquely transcribes the music of inner space.

Perhaps only a painter of his generation can make abstractions that strike us as pure expressions of belief, free of irony, bitterness and self-doubt.

Kenneth Baker
Datebook, SF Chronicle
Saturday, October 28, 2000