Gordon Onslow-Ford (1912-), painter. Born in England; attended the Dragon School in Oxford, the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, and the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. Associated with the surrealistic group in Paris, London and New York (1938-43): came to San Francisco in 1947. His paintings were increasingly governed by his theory that art principally revolved around the use of the circle, the line and the dot (a reduction to their surfaces of the proverbial "cylinder, sphere and cone" described by Cezanne), which he combined in a freely improvisatory way, sometimes to a highly kinetic effect. He was also a significant collector of modern art.

[He was a patron of Harry Partch, when Partch was at his Gate 5 Studio. -jh]