Eric Strauss
Eric Strauss followed an unlikely path to become a sculptor. His father owned and operated a national manufacturing business and the Strauss family had imagined that Eric would one day take over the operations from his dad. But in college, Eric found his attentions straying from his business and economics classes—the businessman’s life was not for him.
Instead, Eric was drawn to the world of fire and metal opened up to him one day by an art professor. The teacher led him into the school foundry to help tidy up the derelict shop, and he fell in love with the furnaces, forceps and molds he found therein. His passions then found him in Tuscany as a young man to study bronze casting and stonecutting under classical masters.
After his training, Eric found himself on his own as a sculptor, leaving him unable to do casting work, which requires a team. His relative owned a scrapyard, though, and Eric was able to help himself to all the scrap metal he needed to weld new creations. This helped to change his artistic emphasis from the negative space-oriented methods of casting and cutting to welding where a sculptor must focus on what pieces are available and how to construct something new from them.
The themes Eric depicts have ranged from botanical to religious iconography to celestial bodies, but the work he’s best known for comes from a very personal part of his experiences. In childhood, he had tended horses on his father’s farm and found his time with them to be a very special, formative part of his life. Again, as an adult, he began tending horses again in the North Georgia mountains for extra income while he established himself as an artist. And as it’s said, art imitates life, and what Eric found he knows best are the very thing he’s spent his life getting to know.
“They’re just like friends to me,” Eric says of his equine charges. “All of them have their own personalities and minds just like dogs. And you can hug these huge animals around the neck and they’ll put their heads on your back to hug you, and you know they could crush you with a single step. But they have to trust me, too, to feed them and bring them in from the cold. That’s why I make my horses in very living, intelligent poses and expressions, because I want people so see not what they are, but who they are.”
After dozens of exhibitions and seeing his work fill the collections of companies, schools, private collectors and museums, Eric has hit his stride as an artist. He is currently deep in the Chattahoochee National Forest in his shed studio on the Ellijay, GA, blueberry farm he shares with his wife and children, working to expand his catalog and develop his style.
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Dixie (ESS DIXIE)
stainless steel
7' 3" H x 3' W x 9' 5" L
$18,000
Additional shipping costs apply.
Please call gallery to purchase.
