Eric Forstmann works with a forlorn beauty, basing his viewpoint on what's around him; in doing so, he paints with an authentic voice. This allows him to keep one foot in the present while the other is in the 19th century. His landscapes are created in "en plein air," or on site outdoors, giving them a distinct look from his studio-painted still lifes.  

Forstmann grew up in nearby Northwest Connecticut and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under Barnett Rubenstein and Henry Schwartz's tutelage. He has had five one-man museum shows at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; The Kemper museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; The Evansville Museum of Arts, History, and Science, Evansville IN; the Mattatuck Museum of Waterbury, CT and Brenau University, Gainesville, GA. He was featured in Naples Collects at the Naples Museum of Art, Naples, FL and in the Norman Rockwell Museum exhibition titled “Realism and the Persistence of Memory” in Stockbridge, MA. He is also the Elected President of Five Points Center for the Visual Arts, in Torrington, Connecticut, and recently held a Residency at the prestigious Vermont Studio Center.

His work has been in Architectural Digest, ARTnews & New England Home. Litchfield Magazine named him one of the “25 Most Influential People” in Litchfield County. Eric serves as the president of the Board of Directors for the Five Points Center for the Visual Arts in Torrington CT. 

His work is in the Selected Collections of:

Taubman Centers, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Aurelius Capital Management LP, New York, NY; Oak Hill Investment Management, Menlo Park, CA; Time Equities, Inc., NY, NY; Meryl Streep & Don Gummer, New York, NY; Kevin Bacon & Kyra Sedgwick, New York, NY; Warren Beatty & Annette Bening, Los Angeles, CA, and George Stephanopoulos & Ali Wentworth, New York, NY.