Untitled (Self-portrait)

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.”