Ted Gordon (American, b. 1924) - Untitled. Colored marker and ink on paper. Signed LR and dated 1998.
Frame: H 18-1/4 in. W 15-1/4 in. Paper: H 11-3/4 in. W 9 in.
Provenance: From the private collection of Charles Locke, June 1998.
The Smithsonian's curator Linda Hartigan first took notice of Gordon's work from a letter he wrote to her in 1976. Soon after, prominent art collectors Chuck and Jan Rosenak visited Ted. By 1981 Ted was represented by San Francisco's Braunstein/Quay Galley, a relationship that continued through 1995. Ted also corresponded with famed artist Jean Dubuffet, the founder of The Art Brut Collection in Lausanne, Switzerland. By 1993 Gordon's doodles were featured in an exhibition at The Art Brut Collection entitled, "Les Obessionnels." 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."
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.