About the Artist

Ted Hansen is an artist and educator whose work is strongly rooted in the natural world.  He grew up on a small farm in southwestern Montana and spent his youth learning to fish, make art, and thrive in the wilderness. While he returns to the mountains every year, he has made Minnesota his home for most of his adult life. Over the years he has explored a wide range of visual and performing arts, but keeps coming back to art that tells the story of the outdoors.  While his subjects center on landscapes and fish, he is always exploring new subjects and ways of creating.  His love of art and learning led him to become a middle school art teacher in Minneapolis.

Ted has created a very large body of work over the decades with a consistent exhibition schedule including solo exhibitions, juried shows in regional galleries, and a long list of smaller exhibitions.  His work is on display in several businesses and in personal collections.  While he works in a variety of media, he is primarily a painter of oil, acrylic and watercolor.  In his younger years he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Bulgaria where he was greatly inspired by the gold leaf iconography of the Byzantine and Bulgaria Orthodox churches. This influenced him to create several works incorporating gold leaf.  

Ted spends a great deal of time in the backcountry and those experiences have a profound impact on his work. He has completed wilderness residencies in Montana and Alaska that inspired dozens of new works. In 2023 Ted and his wife hiked the Continental Divide Trail from Canada to Mexico. He kept an art journal as he went and is currently working on a significant body of work inspired by the hike.