Before Eric Thorsen ever imagined being a professional artist, he was a boy wandering the halls of the Louvre with his mother.
Eric’s father, an American airman, met his French mother while stationed in Le Mans, France. The couple married and settled in Glasgow, Montana, where Eric was born in 1967. Growing up, every summer meant France, with grandparents, cousins and long afternoons in the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Rodin. Standing in front of Rodin’s bronzes, Eric learned something he has never forgotten: a sculpture can make you feel that someone is standing there with you.
A Dorm Room Workshop
At the University of Montana, Eric turned his dorm room into a workshop, carving fish from blocks of wood. People started asking to buy them, and before long he left school to make art full time.
The gamble paid off. In 1992, at just 24, his carving Mystery of the Redd won Best in World at the World Taxidermy & Fish Carving Championships, making him the youngest artist ever to earn the title. A year later, he and his wife, Cyndy, opened a gallery and studio in Bigfork, Montana. They have welcomed visitors there ever since.
Patience in the Wild
Eric found clay in 1995, and his work grew to include people as well as wildlife, cast in bronze. His process still begins the way it did with those first fish: he observes. He has spent hours in the wild, at zoos, and with animals and their owners, waiting for the moment a bear shifts its weight or an eagle turns its head.
“That’s the pose I’m looking for,” Eric says. “The one that tells you who the animal is.”
He sees that patience as a kind of reverence. His Christian faith shapes how he sees wildlife: as creation worth paying close attention to.
Chosen by the People
Over three decades Eric has created hundreds of sculptures, from a life-size bronze of WNBA star Cynthia Cooper for Nike to wildlife now held by the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Natural History Museum in London. Of all his honors, though, the ones that mean the most were chosen by ordinary viewers. Visitors to the C. M. Russell Show voted his work Best Sculpture four years in a row, and crowds in Sioux Falls and Mankato have given him People’s Choice awards too.
His sculptures have also given back. Sales of his work have raised millions of dollars for conservation groups, including Ducks Unlimited, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the National Wild Turkey Federation. He also volunteers in local classrooms, teaching kids to design and 3D-print their own creations.
The Best Part
After all these years, the moment Eric loves most hasn’t changed. It’s the moment a client sees the finished piece for the first time.
“Their excitement is the whole reason I do this,” he says. “It’s their story. I just get to help tell it.”
Eric sells most of his work directly, so every collector knows the artist personally. If you have a story worth telling in bronze, or you’d just like to see the work up close, he would love to meet you at the gallery in Bigfork.