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Edward Spencer (Ted) Faiers was born in Newquay, Cornwall, UK, in 1908. He moved to Manitoba with his parents in 1921, where he studied advertising art with the Training Program, Manitoba Department of Education. In the nineteen-thirties, Faiers moved to Alberta to manage new stores for McLeod's Ltd in Calgary and Lethbridge. He later became Advertising Manager for Hoyt Hardware Co and Western Canada Hardware Ltd in Lethbridge from 1939 to 1950. During the period 1939 to 1943, he studied with H.G. Glyde, Jack Taylor and W.J. Phillips at classes sponsored by the Department of Extension, University of Alberta. It was during this time that he won a scholarship to attend the Banff School of Fine Arts. In the late nineteen-forties, he served as a part-time art instructor with the University of Alberta Department of Extension and served as a member of the Cultural Activities Board for the Province of Alberta. In 1951, Ted Faiers left his job at Western Canada Hardware and moved with his wife and daughter to New York to study at the Arts Students League. In 1952 he accepted a position as a full-time instructor at the Memphis Academy of Arts, teaching painting, printmaking and drawing. He remained at the Memphis Academy for thirty years, with shorter stints at other institutions before retiring to devote his full time to making art.
Ted Faiers' earliest paintings tended to be of Western landscape, strongly influenced by the regionalist approach of American artists Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. Eventually, his work evolved into abstraction, featuring hard-edged, flat shapes presented in pattern-like arrangements. His work has been shown widely, particularly in the US, and he is represented in the collections of the Glenbow Museum, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Southern Art Gallery.
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