You'll find his art everywhere; not on walls, but on tables. Eric Dowdle — painter, puzzle maker and the star of the Magnolia Network series “The Piece Maker” — has brought his puzzles, characterized by folk art depictions of real places, to roughly 5 million homes from his studio in Lindon, Utah. A Latter-day Saint raised on a Wyoming farm with 11 siblings, Dowdle now has become a celebrity of sorts on popular streaming platforms. Every episode of “The Piece Maker” features Dowdle visiting a different location — Alaska, Hawaii, San Francisco, the Outer Banks, New York, Miami, New Orleans and southern Utah. He visits each of these places in preparation to paint them, and at the conclusion of each visit, Dowdle sketches the people he’s met, the food he’s tried and the experiences he’s had in his folk art interpretation of the town. His first puzzle was terrible, he says, but it was an image of something that he felt mattered — a pioneer quilt, which stood out on the puzzle shelves, compared to the images of trees and skies most puzzle companies were selling. He had the puzzle manufactured and sold it to grocery stores. But the gamble started to pay off when he found success painting places, and finding ways to sell puzzles to people who had never before bought puzzles. He sold puzzles of the cities these people loved, and the things they loved to do in those cities. |