I am so happy to have “found” the artist Gordon Onslow Ford. A not well-known British artist, born 1912, died 2003.
The following are notes from his nterview with Lyn Kienhotz for the Metropolitan Arts Commission in 2002. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dMcpzgbR-E)
He was invited to join the Surrealists in Paris with Robert Matte. “We weren’t very good but we were original.” He resigned from the Surrealists “he “didn’t have time to engage in politics…. I was interested in investigating the unconscious.” What’s original, what hasn’t been seen been seen before comes from the unconscious, the spirit.”
He moved to the US and joined Wolfgang Paalen and the Dynaton group. “We wanted to get to them (the inner worlds) directly. We were continuing surrealism on a deeper level. Dynaton was the first step towards the exploration of the inner worlds”
LK asks “Were there any other artists working at the time in a similar way?”
GOF :”Absolutely not.”
LK “Have there been any since?”
GOF: “We were ahead of out time….Probably the influence is just starting now. It’s a great sadness, we didn’t have many friends…”
He and his wife moved to near San Francisco (near Inverness, Point Reyes). San Francisco is on the Pacific Coast and interested in the “Orient”. Spiritual masters from Inda, China and Japan were coming over. He was introduced to Vedanta and “for the first time I was able to say something of what I was doing. Before that I was speechless, as most people are about the spirit.”
He studied Daoism. Then he met Zen Master Hodo Tobase who was “one of the most powerful influences on my life. He was a very simple man — and he’d got it. Some people have got it and some people haven’t. We had a very profound relationship. I had a transmission into the spirit of Zen through calligraphy and just being with Tobase….
I worked like a beaver for 5 years at calligraphy. That is the basis of my art.
It took 14 years to get the line, circle, dot — the deepest language of the spirit. “
Asked about the future…
“Art is going to have a greater impact than it ever has before, because the religions are all in trouble in one way or another and the question of the inner worlds is going to get to the spiritual aspect of the cosmos directly…. I think we must form a closer relation to nature and the spirit of the cosmos. You don’t want to be encumbered with what you know. You’ve got to let the forces of creation work through you. Which means to have an open mind.”