By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society
We’ve written before about the odd couple of the beached ferry Vallejo: bohemian artist Jean Varda and Zen scholar Alan Watts. But before Watts walked the gangplank in reverse to move onto the Vallejo, Varda had an earlier boat-mate: Gordon Onslow Ford.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BAMPFA.
Gordon Onslow Ford’s “The Painter and the Muse (1943)” is in the Berkeley exhibition
Onslow Ford, as he came to be known in the art world, was one of the last surviving members of the 1930s Paris surrealist group surrounding André Breton. After moving to the Bay Area, he became one of the founders of the influential Dynaton group. While living with like-minded artists in a ramshackle Mill Valley mansion during the postwar era, he created psychedelic paintings in a style called Dynaton, from a Greek word meaning “the possible.”
According to a recent Marin IJ article, “The Dynaton movement was short lived, disbanding after a 1951 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but the impact they made on subsequent generations of counterculture artists in the Bay Area was huge. A new year-long exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), ‘What Has Been and What Could Be,’ showcases their work and their influence at the time.”
Born in the English town of Wendover in 1912 to a family of artists, Onslow Ford began painting at an early age. His grandfather was a Victorian sculptor. At age 11 he was painting landscapes under the guidance of his uncle. 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.
The Historical Society’s Betsy Stroman has recounted how Onslow Ford met Varda while visiting Henry Miller at Big Sur in 1947. The two artists reconnected in the Bay Area soon after. Both Onslow Ford, who had served in the British Navy, and Varda wanted to be close to the water, so the two began talking about finding a place together.
In 1949 they found the decommissioned ferry Vallejo, about to be disassembled and sold for scrap by Gardiner Steel Mills. Many years later, Onslow Ford described how they acquired her: “We hurried over to the Gardiner Steel Mills office in Oakland, arrived rather disheveled and said we wanted to acquire the ferry. He asked how much money we had. Varda had none. I had $500. So he took that as a down payment and we agreed to pay $60 a month.”
Onslow Ford moved to land in 1953, and he and his wife eventually settled in Inverness, where he continued to pursue his unique painting style; he died peacefully in his home in 2003, at age 90. He’s considered the most famous of the Dynaton painters, which also included Lee Mullican from Chickasha, Oklahoma and Austrian-born Wolfgang Paalen. Here’s how Paalen described their work: “Our images are not meant to shock nor to relax; they are neither objects for mere aesthetic satisfaction nor for visual experimentation. Our pictures are objects for that active meditation which does not mean detachment from human purpose, but a state of self-transcending awareness, which is not an escape from reality, because it is an intuitive participation in the formative potentialities of reality.”
While their art was once dubbed “Surrealism for the New World” their work may not be as well-known now. In fact, BAMPFA executive director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, who curated the show, hadn’t heard of them.
As the IJ reported: “Widholm first learned about them through Wendi Norris, a Marin resident who has a gallery in San Francisco focusing on contemporary and surrealist art. When Widholm discovered that BAMPFA had one painting from each of the artists in the eclectic 25,000-work collection, she was excited to learn more about the artists and include their work in the exhibition. ‘Their work, I think, is still fresh and interesting to view and consider in a new era,’ she says. ‘I thought it was really exciting to revive their reputation, revive this group and bring more visibility to it.’”
The exhibition runs through July 7, 2024, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2120 Oxford St., Berkeley. Admission is $14.