Gordon Onslow-Ford

Gordon Onslow Ford was born in Wendover, England in 1912. Influenced by family members, his painting career began at an early age. His grandfather was a well-known Elizabethan sculptor, and his aunt exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy of London. Shortly after the death of his father in 1926, Ford began studies at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth at age fourteen. He also attended the Dragon School in Oxford and the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1947, and in the 1950s he developed a deep interest in Asian philosophy and the belief that the most direct, profound, and open expression of the inner world was what he called “line/circle/dot.”