Ted Gordon was born in Kentucky in 1924. He completed his secondary education in New York and then moved to San Francisco where he graduated at the San Francisco State College. Gordon had been working in a psychiatric hospital until his retirement in 1987. His art is completely self-taught. He painted one subject only on smaller and bigger papers: his obsessively detailed male faces are often thought to be self-portraits. The figures outlines are nearly engraved on the paper by the heavy use of a ball pen; the figures is then coloured by felt tip markers. Gordon usually works on spare pieces of x-ray films carton boxes that he finds in the hospital. His work was extensively shown throughout the United States and is included in many collections as the Collection de l’Art Brut in Losanna, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum, The Museum of American Folk Aert, the American Visionary Art Museum. In 2000 the Folk Art Society of America awarded Gordon with its prestigious prize for folk artists.