Ted Gordon

E-H

16 Dec

Harold Theodore (Ted) Gordon was born in 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky to an emotionally distant mother. The eldest of three children, Gordon was sent upstairs to live and be raised by his paternal grandparents. Gordon remembers his father had a gift for sketching. He was only 14 when his father died unexpectedly and then Gordon began doodling and drawing caricatures of his own.

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. The mind gives free rein to the hand, whose gestures in turn provoke the mind, in a sustained circle of impulses."

For more than 30 years, the artistry of Ted Gordon has been sought after and collected throughout the world. Intensely private, Gordon has never left his modest home in California to attend any exhibition opening. Nonetheless Gordon revels in the fact that his prolific "doodling" has won him such far-flung recognition explaining, "These doodles are my only legacy... each face is mine at the moment of execution, a tentative installment of one interminable self-portrait."