Gordon Onslow Ford and J.B. Blunk, friends who lived side by side for four decades in Inverness, are together again in the current exhibition at the Blunk Space in Point Reyes Station. The collection of 27 paintings, plus works on paper, ceramics and a carved walnut sculpture, is both unpretentious and extraordinary.
“Gordon Onslow Ford and JB Blunk” presents work from 1951 to 1970, made just before and during the decades in which they cultivated a lifelong friendship. In 1955, the American artist Isamu Noguchi, a mutual friend, introduced them. At the time, Onslow Ford was living in Mill Valley, where he nurtured an appreciation for Zen Buddhism and calligraphy while studying with Alan Watts and Hodo Tobase at the Academy of Asian Studies. Blunk had recently returned from three years apprenticing in Japan with two master ceramicists. They became fast friends, eventually erecting homes on the same parcel in Inverness. “It was their shared, deep engagement with Japanese aesthetics and arts that allowed their friendship to quickly take hold,” writes Fariba Bogzaran, the exhibition’s co-curator.
In Japan, Blunk became the first American to acquire firsthand knowledge of centuries-old techniques used to make Bizen ceramics, an unglazed, woodfired pottery. The exhibit includes a few examples, notably Shield-Bizen Vase (1953), a gently compressed, earthen vessel with an irregular, triangular form excised from the surface. Other sculptural ceramic objects have similar orifices. A tabular work from 1960, installed under a painting on a salvaged redwood panel, plays with our perception of negative and positive space. It appears to have three eyes; two are formed by the absence of glaze and one is a literal void.
The influence of Japanese aesthetics on Blunk’s work is apparent in two sparse, untitled drawings on rice paper juxtaposed with small-scale ceramics dating to the 1960s. The installation recalls one of Blunk’s first exhibitions: In 1956, his Bizen and Bizen-style pottery was shown at the Oakland Art Museum alongside examples of contemporary calligraphy on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the present show, the painted surfaces of Blunk’s small ceramics echo the enlarged, pointillist brushwork of Onslow Ford’s paintings, particularly Trail Blaze (1959). One of Blunk’s small, unpainted vessels (c. 1968) appears to draw inspiration from Onslow Ford’s ecstatic Arise (1968), transforming the painter’s signature dabs of paint into structural units of clay, endowing abstract form with a quiet utility.
Although few examples of his woodwork appear in the show, Blunk shifted his focus to woodworking as he built his and Onslow Ford’s homes using salvaged materials. In so doing, he began working on an environmental scale. In 1969, the Oakland Museum of California commissioned The Planet (1969), a redwood sculpture for sitting permanently installed at the museum. Blunk thought of the home he devotedly cultivated as a living sculpture and work of art.
Onslow Ford arrived at his formal language—lines, circles and dots—in the early 1950s while “walking on the Dipsea Trail under the spell of the redwood groves, the rolling costal range, the Pacific Ocean and the sky,” as he explained in his 1978 book “Creation.” The magnetic center of the Blunk Space show is Wind in Wind (1969), a rough, textured canvas filled with those calligraphic markings and fastened to a secondary support painted to resemble the sky—what could be viewed as the abstracted atmosphere of an idyllic afternoon in Inverness. The piece yokes a surrealist fascination with materiality and collage to color-forward, Bay Area abstraction (think of Richard Diebenkorn’s contemporaneous Ocean Park series). At the same time, the painting pays formal homage to Hodo Tobase’s calligraphy.
Wind in Wind is even more remarkable if we imagine Onslow Ford—during a moment of extreme social unrest, on the heels of the Kennedy and King assassinations, the same years as the Berkeley protests at People’s Park, the Occupation of Alcatraz and the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam—tucked away in the woods fashioning absorbing, energetic and serene works of art like this one. To place it in a broader context, the same year, curator and critic Lucy Lippard was developing the first numbered show “557,087,” which was installed up the coast in Seattle, as an early survey of conceptual art. This movement, which had branches in the Bay Area, is often thought of as emphasizing ideas over material presence. According to the dominant voices of the moment, painting was dead.
But it was alive in Inverness. As was a reverence for materials, like wood, that directly evoke nature. “It is essential to find a sanctuary from… the distractions of fleeting fashions,” Onslow Ford wrote. According to Noguchi, it was Blunk’s isolation that made his particular artistic practice possible. In 1978, he wrote, “I like to think that the courage and independence JB has shown is typically Californian, or at least Western, with a continent between to be free from categories that are called art. Here the links seem to me more to the open sky and spaces, and the far reaches of time from where come the burled stumps of those great trees.” Separated from the mutable centers of the art world, the rhetoric of which regulated the tides, Blunk and Onslow Ford found their own worthy aesthetic solutions.
Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow is an art historian and curator who lives in Tomales. The exhibit is on view at 11101 Highway 1, Suite 105 through Jan. 8 Thursdays through Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment.