Nobody will look at your art more than in a puzzle

SALT LAKE CITY — He is the creator of the largest wall puzzle in the world (20 feet by 60 feet); he's produced a puzzle with more pieces (60,000 of them) than any puzzle in history; he's sold more folk art puzzles (25 million and counting) than any artist living or dead; he's been in not one but two television series — starring him.

You have to hand it to Eric Dowdle. When he decided it was OK to carve his art into tiny pieces, he didn't do it halfway.

If the fate of artists is supposed to be, 1. toil in anonymity; 2. starve; and 3. have people say, "Oh, he was very good" after you're long departed, well, not for Dowdle. It could be argued that more people have spent more time gazing at his paintings than any other artist who ever picked up a brush.

At first, he resisted. Of course, he did. He's an artist. Right-brain ruled. Even after more than a decade of agreeing to slice his paintings into puzzle-sized pieces so he could afford to buy groceries and pay the rent, he still felt he was betraying his talent. He almost sold Dowdle Folk Art, the puzzle business he started in 1997.

But then, in 2010, Dowdle was asked by his Latter-day Saint ward to help with a Christmas pageant themed around prints made by Currier and Ives, the kings of folk art who reigned in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Looking at the iconic art of Nathaniel Currier and James Ives, and how it has contributed to culture in such a long-lasting and positive way, gave Dowdle a different point of view.

"I studied Currier and Ives," he says, "they wrote the American story, because people back then would spend an hour in front of a piece of art. But now we're in the microwave age; we walk by art in two seconds and we're gone. Then I realized, 15 to 20 hours is the average time people spend on a puzzle. Nobody will look at your art more than in a puzzle. And folk art, the interaction of people and their environment, is the best genre for puzzles, it's not even close.

"So I recalibrated," he says.

He'd sold a million puzzles to that point, which seems like a lot.

He's sold 24 million since.

A fully invested artist, it turned out, is its own force of nature. Not long after the Currier and Ives Christmas, a deal with Costco was finalized. Then, as more and more people in more and more places began appreciating the attention to cultural detail in Dowdle's folk art puzzles, more and more of them reached out to ask him to paint their town Dowdle Style.

His trademark became visiting a place before he painted it — embed yourself and recruit the locals who know the history and love the culture to ensure that what you paint is what they'd paint (of the more than 400 paintings he's turned into puzzles, only two — Jerusalem and Rio de Janeiro — have not included in-person visits).

In 2012, KBYU Radio started a podcast called "Traveling with Eric Dowdle" that chronicled the artist's globetrotting adventures. That, in turn, led to a television series, "Painting the Town," that aired for three seasons on PBS from 2015 to 2018. And that led to yet another TV series, "The Piece Maker," produced by the Magnolia Network that streamed on HBO Max and Discovery in 2023.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a boon to puzzle-makers, Dowdle included. It was during the lockdown that he decided to create the massive 20-foot by 60-foot puzzle that takes up the entire north wall at his headquarters studio west of the freeway in Lindon. In it, he combines details of world landmarks with personal touches such as one puzzle piece that is an image of Rudy Gunter, his revered high school art teacher at Wyoming's Green River High School.

The 32,000-piece wall puzzle, held together by "all the velcro we could find in Utah County," is not to be confused with the 60,000-piece "What a Wonderful World" Dowdle puzzle that is billed as the "world's largest puzzle." Dowdle finished that one in 2021. Sold (and sold out) as a limited edition by Costco, it is physically smaller than the wall puzzle — measuring eight feet by 29 feet — but has nearly twice as many pieces.

Puzzle buffs near and far took on the challenge of finishing the world's largest puzzle. That included the entire student body at North Cache Middle School in Richmond. It took them 30 days. When they were finished they framed the puzzle and mounted it on the school wall.

The fact that the folk art wouldn't be hanging up there if it wasn't in a puzzle helps prove the point of the man who painted it. Along with those 25 million-plus Dowdle Puzzles in circulation.

"It's what all artists want," Dowdle says, "to be seen."

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