(1924 - )

Ted Gordon is originally from Kentucky. After spending his teenage years in New York he moved to San Francisco to work as a medical clerk in a hospital. Gordon began his career as a "doodler" in 1951.Ted Gordon is known for his compulsive style and for his singular theme of the human face. His pen and ink and coloured pencil drawings are done in symmetrical patterns of spirals and lines on paper or poster board. "When I draw something," he explains, "I am that person, fish, or bird." Although Gordon draws some animals, the majority of his doodles are a human face - his own. It has been said that "His self protraits are of a person in torment, never at ease or in repose." Some people consider his early drawings done on the back of the posters advertising the San Francisco opera his benchmark work. Ted Gordon was considered a personal favorite of Jan and Chuck Rosenak, Gordon had a one person show at the Collection de L'Art Brut in Lousanne, Switzerland, and was the only American included in a show there in 1996 ("Les Obsessionneis"). His work was also included in "Visions from the Left Coast: California Self-Taught Artists" in Santa Barbara, California in 1995 and in a 1998 two-artist exhibition at the Folk Art Museum in San Francisco, California. Gordon's drawings are in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Collection de L'Art Brut, Lousanne, Switzerland; The Musgrave-Kinley Collection, London; The Aracine Collection, Paris; the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American Art, Washington, D. C.; the Milwaukee Art Museum; The American Folk Art Museum, New York; and The American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland. He received an award of distinction from the Folk Art Society of America in 2000. Bibliography: Contemporary American Folk Art - A Collector's Guide, Rosenak (1996); Self Taught, Outsider and Folk Art, Betty-Carol Sellen (2000).

Click on image to enlarge