ART : Keeping Alive Surreal Legacy : Gordon Onslow Ford paints what he calls ‘inner worlds,’ a realm more basic than dreams, as a direct expression from mind to canvas.

“Why don’t you just shoot from the hip?,” Gordon Onslow Ford suggests puckishly to a photographer trying to pose him in front of one of his paintings at the Laguna Art Museum.

A compactly roly-poly man of 77, he is stiffly enduring a photo opportunity in honor of “Pursuit of the Marvelous,” an exhibit of work from the 1930s and ‘40s by three Surrealist artists, of whom he is the sole survivor.

But back in his hotel room, a U-shaped, pleased-as-punch smile fleetingly lights up his face as he discusses his quixotic goal of painting the human unconscious.

He long ago discovered that it isn’t possible to paint dreams, he says, “because dreams happen faster than you can record them, so you’re painting memories of dreams. I was looking for a way to find a direct expression from the mind to the canvas.”

What he paints, he explains with courtly patience, are “inner worlds,” a realm somehow more basic than dreams and myths. “I’m convinced that the mind is the primary moving force of existence,” he says. “What I’m really after is finding out what the inner worlds look like.”

He begins by making “automatic” drawings, a legacy from his Surrealist period. Produced very quickly, without premeditation or correction, the drawings are full of markings that at first look chaotic. But certain images crop up repeatedly, over time.

“You have to trust and also have patience. . . . If you’re interested in finding an inner world, it doesn’t happen in one bang. As in Genesis, you know, the world was created in several days.”

Onslow Ford was born in England into a family steeped in public service. “Nearly all the male members of my family were done in by the Empire in one way or another. Very honorably; they wouldn’t have had it any other way,” he remarks dryly.

But he was unhappy as a lieutenant in the British Navy. He wanted to be a painter. And so, in 1936, at age 24, he went to Paris.

“It was absolutely marvelous, the first breath of freedom I’d had, you know. I had some introductions to people in Paris--successful writers and others--and they weren’t of any interest. So basically I was all alone. (But) one year after I arrived in Paris, I was in the heart of Surrealism.

“I studied with (painter Fernand) Leger for a few days. I told him that I couldn’t work with him, I wasn’t suited to him. I didn’t feel at home. He set out a composition of bottles and a piece of string and a matchbox, and you had to draw them, you know. All the lines had to be right, all the spaces had to be right, and it was a week’s work.

“Well, it took me four days to (realize) it wasn’t for me. . . . But Leger was a wonderful man, generous and warmhearted.”

A couple of years later, Onslow Ford discovered automatic drawing during a summer in Brittany with his friend, Chilean Surrealist Roberto Sebastian Matta Echuarren--known as Matta--another rebellious former student of Leger’s.

Meanwhile, the Surrealists were hanging out at the Paris cafe Deux Magots. Matta had an introduction from painter Salvador Dali to Andre Breton, the poet who was the guiding spirit of the Surrealist movement.

“Matta put on his best suit, can you imagine, and went there with some drawings. Later, Breton said, ‘The most impossible young man came with the most marvelous drawings.’ (But) I didn’t dare to go for a long, long time. I wasn’t ready.

“Eventually Breton came to my studio and we got along very well. He was looking for something new because there’d been a split in the Surrealist group. He needed some new blood, so it just fell to our lot to be needed and wanted.”

At a time when Surrealism had come to mean the realistic imagery of Dali and Rene Magritte, Matta and Onslow Ford returned to the notion of improvising ways to tap into inner states through abstract imagery. Both young artists were interested in mystical philosophy and metaphysics, and they wanted to capture the cosmic interconnectedness of the universe in their paintings.

“I was in seventh heaven,” Onslow Ford recalls. “And I was for the first time able to live freely and to paint. I’d escaped from my education and all the restraints of being brought up in England. . . . In Paris, that all went away. I never spoke a word of English the whole time I was in Paris.”

And then came World War II. “I had to make a big decision, you know, whether to (fight) the war, which I had been trained to do, or whether to be a painter. . . . So I made the decision to get out.”

He came to New York in 1940 at the invitation of the Society for the Preservation of European Culture.

“I was the only Surrealist who spoke English well enough, so it fell to my lot to introduce Surrealist painting to all the young (American) painters, which I did at the New School.”

In the audience were artists who would become the first generation of Abstract Expressionists--Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes and others. They were particularly intrigued by “automatic” processes, Onslow Ford says.

“They’d all been to art school, but they liked the idea that you didn’t have to go to art school,” he says, laughing heartily. “What they got out of it was the technical aspect, finding a new way to handle paint on the canvas. But in the case of Jackson Pollock, it was much more than technique. His (paintings offer) a major insight into spaces of the mind.”

Still, Onslow Ford says he believes that Pollock’s painting remained “in a very primitive stage.” The British artist claims the system he discovered in the early 1950s, which he calls “line-circle-dot,” comes much closer.

“I found out,” he explains, “that the fastest (marks) you can make are the line, the circle and the dot. From the point of view of art, this is the ground from which everything grows. A circle goes around full speed, a line shoots up and down, and the dot goes in.”

Another basic ingredient in Onslow Ford’s paintings are squiggly forms he calls “live-line beings.” He sees them not as symbols or signs but, more mysteriously, as “a new form of existence.”

He places the canvas on the floor to paint, as Pollock did. “It’s all done in the air,” he says. “The canvas isn’t touched at all. These images happen faster than you could do with a brush, and they have a life around them that you couldn’t get with a brush.

“If you put the canvas on a wall, it’s like (facing) another person. If you put a canvas on the floor, it’s facing the sky. You don’t have a feeling of boundaries. You have absolutely unlimited space.”

Despite having lived in the right places at the right times in the history of modern art, Onslow Ford remains a rather obscure figure. He rates only two brief mentions in a popular book on Surrealism and he is ignored by a major reference book on contemporary artists. From time to time, his work is included in exhibitions dealing with the spiritual in art or the influence of Surrealism.

“I’ve worked very hard all my life and I have a great body of work which isn’t known,” he says without bitterness. “It’s all underground.”

But his hopes for the future of art border on the messianic: “Every great culture begins, I believe, with a vision of the depths of the mind. What touches you is the spiritual content. I feel that modern art has been in an experimental stage, and now it is beginning a new life, full of new hope.. . . When this art comes into being, it’ll bring everybody together again, in harmony with the ecology.”

The rhythms of nature are a great delight and source of inspiration to Onslow Ford. After living in a remote Mexican village for several years during the ‘40s, he and his California-born wife Jacqueline considered returning to Paris or New York. But they chose instead to live “in the wilds,” at the edge of a forest in Marin County.

“The whole place is alive. There are surprises every day,” he says eagerly. “If you’re in the city, it’s very stimulating but . . . if you can get into the wilds without anyone looking over your shoulder, there’s a chance of something happening.”

“Pursuit of the Marvelous: Stanley William Hayter, Charles Howard, Gordon Onslow Ford” remains through Jan. 13 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive in Laguna Beach. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission is $2 general, $1 for seniors and students, free for children under 12. (714) 494-6531.