Harold Theodore (Ted) Gordon (American, born 1924)
Theodore Harold (Ted) Gordon’s biographer Roger Cardinal explains the intensity of Gordon’s pictorial expression as “a short-circuit in the creative current, whereby the self-taught draftsman, absorbed by his image-making, becomes a perpetual motion machine, an instrument of what the Surrealists called ‘automatism’ or spontaneous, unmonitored creation.” A government worker for decades, Gordon avoids most social relations, preferring life at home with his wife and the solitary and obsessive pursuit of his art. While he draws animals and people, most of his drawings are male portraits, possibly self-portraits, meticulously hatched by rarely-repeated linear patterns pressed into (usually 12″x 11″) paper with pens and accented with colored felt-tip pens and pencils.
Gordon, the recipient of a one-person show at Collection de L’Art Brut in Lousanne, Switzerland, has drawings in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Collection de L’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland; Musgrave-Kinley Collection, London, England; Aracine Collection, Paris, France; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; and American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY. In 1998, the artist donated to the permanent collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD what is the largest and most representative collection of his work in the United States. He received an award of distinction from the Folk Art Society of America in 2000.
Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.
Ted Gordon is a California-based artist who has been represented by Braunstein / Quay Gallery, San Francisco, and the Outsider Folk Art Gallery, Reading, Pennsylvania. His works are represented in the permanent collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Virginia and the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Information Courtesy of Skinner, Inc., December, 2011.