Continuing through January 25, 2026
“Sky High Hay” (1960) is a mesmerizing black and white painting by Gordon Onslow Ford (1912-2003) that evokes an inner universe composed of spirals, dots, grids and dashes. The man who painted it was an aesthetic hybridizer first shaped by European modernism before encountering Asian philosophy and aesthetics while living in Northern California. Featured in ”Human | Nature: California Zen in Big Sur and the Bay Area,” “Sky High Hay” was shaped by the Zen-based culture that emerged in the Bay Area during the 1950s.
Shortly before arriving in the United States in 1940, English-born Onslow Ford, who had been part of André Breton’s surrealist group in Paris, wrote an article that called for a rejection of “the school whose aim is reproduction of the rational world …” That point of view, which Onslow Ford expounded on in a popular series of talks at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1941, would influence a rising generation of American artists that included Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. After a sojourn in Mexico, Onslow Ford moved to San Francisco in 1947 to co-found the Dynaton group with his wife Jacqueline Johnson, Wolfgang Paalen and Lee Mullican. He studied with former Episcopal priest and Zen scholar Alan Watts at the Asian Academy, met the Zen master Hodo Tobase, and practiced Chinese calligraphy. Onslow Ford’s cosmological paintings, which have been described as “objects for meditation,” fused the spontaneity of surrealism with the search for true inner nature encouraged by Zen practice. Increasingly alert to overlaps in Western and Asian thought, Onslow Ford would later opine that the Surrealists had “made intuitively many of the discoveries of Zen … but they did not know how to talk about it.”
There are 20 artists represented in “Human | Nature,” curated by David D. Keaton, with Zen being their common ingredient. The paintings, prints, and sculptures selected by Keaton are generally abstract but share no particular style, since Zen offers principles that can be broadly interpreted. These non-hierarchical principles, as enumerated in Shin’ichi Hisamatsu’s 1971 book “Zen and the Fine Arts” are simplicity (kanso), asymmetry (fukinsei), austere sublimity (koko), naturalness (shizen), freedom from routine (daisuzoku), tranquility (sei-jaku), and profound grace (yugen). The concepts of “Mu” (emptiness) and “Ma” (the active space between things) also found exponents. In California, where rugged mountains and coastlines provided both inspiration and solitude, the observation of natural phenomena further infused the forms — and in some cases the formlessness — of Zen-derived art. As with Onslow Ford, the Zen ingredients in each artist’s work came from varied sources at different moments in their development.
James Suzuki, (1933-2022), whose 1963 canvas “Stone Age Japan” hangs near “Sky High Hay,” was born in Yokohama, where he studied with Yoshio Markino, a Japanese artist and writer who had absorbed Western influences while living abroad. At Markino’s urging, the 19-year-old Suzuki traveled to the West Coast, then went on to study at the Portland School of Fine Arts in Maine, seeking an authentically American experience. By 1958 Suzuki was living and exhibiting in New York, where he was energized by contact with Abstract Expressionism. As the title “Stone Age Japan” implies, the culture of ancient Japan was still a force in Suzuki’s art as he absorbed the lessons of Western abstraction. The colors of earth, sea, vegetation and sky, which evoke the contemplation of nature and its energies in a non-specific way, have a Zen presence that is activated by a gestural spontaneity related to action painting. The composition, which combines window-like vignettes above a grouping of spirals and other active forms, expresses a confluence of visible and invisible energies.
In a 1958 article that appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, Watts noted that “the Zen craftsman always likes to follow rather than dominate the nature of his materials …” This responsiveness to materials is apparent in an “Untitled” sculpture (1970) by JB Blunk (1926-2022) which was carved from an irregular chunk of salvaged redwood. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi, whom Blunk met in Japan before coming to live in California on Onslow Ford’s property, explained that Blunk’s inspiration came from “open sky and spaces, and the far reaches of time from where comes the buried stumps of those great trees.” Part invention, part found object, Blunk’s attentive carving respects the redwood’s knots, grains, splits and junctions.
“Tidelines,” a 1964 bronze by Nancy Genn (b. 1929), who once shared a studio with Jay DeFeo, embodies the Zen ideals of asymmetry and mindfulness. Its playful and irregular forms spiral outwards, a welter of energy and ideas that cannot be contained.
“Human | Nature” is a revelatory show, both in terms of its re-examination of the role of Zen culture and in its inclusion of artists whose work and reputations are deserving of reconsideration. Among them is Muriel Francis Goodwin (1928-2012), whose intuitive and free-flowing sumi-e ink painting, which feels like an inner landscape, is extraordinarily sensitive and evocative. Goodwin found solace in Zen Buddhism after her difficult divorce from Sam Francis, whom she had accompanied to Paris in 1950. Also a poet, Goodwin was included in a group exhibition at the Dilexi Gallery in 1958, one of three women and ten male artists. Because Zen offered her what Watts characterized as “a faith in insecurity itself,” it provided Goodwin with invaluable lessons in embracing life’s impermanence with a joy that is deeply embedded in this exhibition.
