SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Weinstein Gallery presents, as it’s inaugural exhibition for its new 2nd floor gallery, Gordon Onslow Ford: Paintings from the Vallejo. The exhibition will run from October 12th-November 12th, 2007 at Weinstein Gallery’s newest locale, 291 Geary Street, overlooking Union Square.

Always on the cutting edge of innovation, the west coast has been a beacon for new beginnings since the frontier days. Apropos to the reputation of the West, in 1947 the Surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford and his wife Jacqueline Johnson chose California to embark on a new phase of their lives as artists. They were not the only ones. Halfway between the American East Coast and the Far East, the Bay Area, specifically, became a meeting point for artists and thinkers interested in implementing eastern philosophies into their already avant garde repertoire. After his 1948 retrospective show at the SFMOMA, Towards a New Subject in Painting, Onslow Ford and his friend, painter/poet Jean Varda, moved their respective studios onto the S.S. Vallejo, docked in Sausalito.

The S.S. Vallejo was to become a meeting place for some of the most interesting people in the Bay Area in the 1950s. Artists Lee Mullican, Wolfgang Paalen, Roberto Matta, Ruth Asawa; writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Maya Angelou; cultural figures Alan Watts, Herb Caen, and Timothy Leary all came aboard. In 1951 Gordon Onslow Ford, Lee Mullican, and Wolfgang Paalen opened Dynaton at the SFMOMA, an exhibition entirely conceived and executed on the Vallejo.