“Tobase was a benevolent tyrant. He'd give us a tremendous amount of work Just to study four characters a week, to be able to write them with a feeling of what they meant was enough, but there was always something else. I gave my best energies to calligraphy for five years and learned by leaps and bounds. It was just what I had been lacking. Because the surrealists in Paris with w hom I had grown up had made intuitively many of the discoveries of Zen but they didn't have any metaphysics; they didn't knowhow to talk about it. They were poets and painters and revolutionaries and they didn't have the wisdom of Buddhism behind them. So my calligraphy studies complemented my life as a painter.”
Creation in the Instant: An futerview with Painter Gordon Onslow-Ford