Attributed to Gordon Onslow Ford, it does not have a COA. Medium: acrylic mansonite. 34 x 19 inches. Provenance: private owner.
Biography: 1912 - 2003. Gordon Onslow Ford (December 26, 1912 - November 9, 2003) was the last surviving member of the 1930s Paris surrealist group surrounding André Breton. Gordon Onslow Ford was born in Wendover, England, on Dec. 26, 1912. He attended the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth and served as an officer in the British Navy until 1937, when he resigned to pursue a career in art. In 1938, he became an official member of the surrealist group in Paris. In Paris he met Roberto Matta, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and other Surrealists whose interests he shared. In 1938, he became an official member of the Surrealist group, which was founded and led by the poet Andre Breton.In 1941 an expatriate group in New York invited Mr. Ford, who had returned to Britain at the outset of World War II, to present a series of lectures on Surrealism at the New School for Social Research, now the New School University. (He was one of the few English-speaking Surrealists.) He also organized four exhibitions of Surrealist art. The lectures and exhibitions influenced Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and others who would go on to create Abstract Expressionism. It was while in New York that he met and married Jacqueline Johnson. They lived in Erongaricuaro, a small village in central Mexico, for six years before moving to San Francisco. 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). In 1958 they moved to Inverness where they had previously purchased 300 acres of forest.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." His paintings 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 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.For more than six decades he continued to make paintings in which loopy lines, organic shapes and glowing spaces created the impression of visionary mindscapes. With their layered patterns and luminous colors, his canvases had a cheerful decorative appeal and a spiritual optimism informed by Carl Jung's psychology, Zen Buddhism and the artist's own metaphysical and aesthetic theories. Mr. Ford had his first retrospective in 1948 at what is now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and another at the Oakland Museum of California in 1978. His paintings are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon. R. Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Britain in London and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Signed [Artist Name] : In cases in which the signature is legible in the lot, this work is described as-is with no attributions given.

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In the manner of [Artist Name] : The work was executed by an unknown hand, but was designed deliberately to emulate the style of the artist.

After [Artist Name] : The work was executed by an unknown hand, but is a deliberate copy of a known work by the artist.

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Follower of [Artist Name]: A work by a pupil or a follower of the artist (not necessarily a pupil).

American, 19th century: This work was executed by an unknown hand, and can only be identified by origin (i.e., region, period).

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