Kim Wiggins | A Unique Voice

Kim Wiggins’ contemporary canvases celebrate the West and its history

By Norman Kolpas

This story was featured in the August 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art August 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

KIM WIGGINS couldn’t believe his good fortune. The year was 1983, and at just 24 years of age, he had been invited to join the American Impressionist Society as its youngest member. He headed to St. Louis from his home in New Mexico to see his latest works in the group’s second annual show alongside those of such masters as Walt Gonske, Robert Daughters, and Doug Higgins.

“I remember walking, so excited, into this huge exhibition space,” Wiggins recalls. “And I saw one of my paintings, a landscape of the Hondo Valley in southern New Mexico, hanging on the far wall. I shot across the room to look at it. And as I got almost right up to it, I realized it wasn’t my work but another artist’s.” In that instant, Wiggins’ spirits plummeted. “It absolutely devastated me, because I realized I had no voice of my own as an artist. I may have sold all five of my paintings at the show. But I was painting the same message as everyone else.”

That moment of crestfallen insight launched Wiggins on a multiyear process of experimentation and self-discovery through which he transform-ed not only his style but also his very philosophy of and approach to art. The results of that inner pilgrimage ultimately led him to evolve a style that merges expressionism and modernism and is influenced, he says, “by everything from New Mexican folk art to Hispanic design, to Mexican muralists like [Diego] Rivera and [David Alfaro] Siqueiros, to western artists like W.R. Leigh and Thomas Hart Benton.”

In the process, Wiggins became, and remains today, one of the forerunners of an artistic movement that has come to be summed up by the term “New West.” Along the way, he has won recognition and acclaim that includes multiple top awards, most recently the Stories of the West Award at this year’s Masters of the American West show at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, his works have found permanent homes with private collectors and leading cultural institutions across the nation, including—to name just a few—the American Museum of Western Art in Denver, the Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio, and the Booth Western Art Museum in Georgia. And Wiggins has achieved it all, he says, through a sort of return to innocence, recapturing “a lot of childlike quality that comes through exploring those exciting new things that you see in life.”

A FULL MOON in the nighttime sky first excited Wiggins’ artistic fervor. He was “a little over 3 years old,” he thinks, when he sat in bed one night in his early childhood home in El Paso, TX, staring intently out his window at the full moon as he attempted to draw it with pencil on paper. “I remember spending a long time trying to shade in all the dark areas,” he says.

He grew up the middle of three children in a family uncommonly blessed with western heritage and artistic inspiration. His dad, Walt Wiggins, gained widespread respect as a top photojournalist after serving in World War II, writing and photographing over 600 adventure stories between 1946 and 1959 for every major national magazine except Time. “He was an Indiana Jones kind of guy,” Wiggins says, who even piloted his own plane. His mom, Roynel Fitzgerald Wiggins, had been a rodeo cowgirl in her youth, “and she taught me to drive, to shoot a rifle, to trap, and to rope.” Both parents grew up on ranches and, along with Kim’s grandparents, instilled in him a rich appreciation for his family’s past.

In addition, his uncle Bill Wiggins, following wartime service and a stint on the family’s Twin Arrows Ranch, became a fine artist of note, in a style that progressed from impressionism to modernism to abstraction. “He and my father were my two major influences as an artist,” Wiggins says today.

When Kim was still in grade school, his father launched a quarter horse magazine called Quarter Racing World and then a related newspaper titled Speedworld, based near the family’s home in Roswell, NM, where Wiggins still lives. Its graphic-arts department provided him with an ideal after-school and summer training ground. Later, when the publication moved to Oklahoma City in his high-school years, he’d spend summer vacations working there.

Before those high-school years, however, Wiggins achieved another artistic milestone. Using hobbyist’s white modeling clay that could be fired to rock-hard stability in a home oven, he’d begun sculpting his own small wildlife figures—wolves, mountain lions, bears—inspired by a book his father had given him of works by the great western artist Charles M. Russell. “When I was 12, Jim Clark, an art dealer from Scottsdale, stopped by our house to show my parents some paintings he was selling,” Wiggins says. Clark saw young Kim’s small sculptures and asked if he could take a few back to Arizona and have them cast in bronze. They all sold, and continued to sell for the next several years.

Meanwhile, Wiggins had taken up painting, progressing through pastels and watercolors to oil paints by his senior year of high school. His passion for art continued through six years of service in the Army Corps of Engineers, stationed first in San Antonio and then for four years in Darmstadt, Germany, south of Frankfurt. “I spent a lot of my spare time visiting art museums and did a lot of impromptu painting with a real nice set of oils and a traveling easel my parents bought me,” he says. The style of those works was inspired and informed by the art he had the opportunity to witness firsthand. “I was fascinated with Impressionism, post-Impressionism, and expressionism,” he adds.

After Wiggins completed his service and returned stateside, Jim Clark met up with him on the Santa Fe plaza and took “seven or eight” of his paintings back to Scottsdale. “He sold one the next day and sent me a check almost immediately,” Wiggins remembers. Soon after, his parents opened their own art gallery in Santa Fe, and he began working there while “I just painted like a madman on weekends and in the evenings.” Then along came that fateful phone call inviting him into the ranks of America’s top impressionists—and the resulting realization that he needed to find his own artistic style.

THAT RESOLUTE decision dismayed, at first, the two people whose opinions he valued most. “My parents were very concerned,” he admits. “They said, ‘You’ve got an advantage that most people your age would give their right arms for.’ But I felt I had to find my own voice.”

In the process, several respected artists and teachers “took me under their wings, offering critiques and love, and helping shape my life,” he says. He studied in a summer master’s class at the Santa Fe Art Institute taught by Henriette Wyeth (1907-1997), the eldest daughter of famed illustrator N.C. Wyeth and sister of Andrew Wyeth. “She emphasized doing your homework, making incredibly detailed black-and-white sketches on canvas and then painting over them. That taught me a valuable lesson”—and a process he still follows to this day.

He also worked under the watchful eye of Alexandre Hogue (1898-1994), one of the Dallas Nine who formed a distinctive movement of Southwestern regionalism in the late 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. Hogue had himself been mentored early in his career by Ernest Blumenschein, part of the original Taos Society of Artists founded in 1915. “He instilled into my work the discipline Blumenschein had taught him, and I had five two-person shows with Mr. Hogue,” Wiggins says.

The real test of his new direction came at a solo show Wiggins opened during Santa Fe’s Indian Market in August 1991, presenting more than two dozen new works—half in his old impressionistic style, the other half using his newfound approach. Before the opening, his father regarded them all. As Wiggins recalls, “Then he walked up, put his arm around me, and said, ‘Son, I want you to know I love you, but I think you’re making a mistake.’” And yet, every single painting sold. “And I determined that this unique style, like nobody else was painting, was the avenue I was going to take,” says the artist.

Exactly one year later, Wiggins introduced a new show of oils entirely in his new style. This time, he says, “My father said, ‘Son, I love you, and I want you to know you made the right decision.’” All those paintings sold as well. A few days later, in August 1992, Walt Wiggins died at the age of 68 from cancer, diagnosed just six months earlier.

His father’s wisdom and support still ever-present, Wiggins continues to this day to celebrate his western birthright, one in which he continues to steep himself through diligent reading and research in support of the historical subjects he often paints. He proudly passes down that legacy to his five children, all grown, with Maria, his beloved wife of 25 years.

That sharing of the western past, in fact, has become the driving force behind his unforgettably vivid style, which possesses the power to make viewers feel that they’ve as much dreamed a painting as witnessed it. “Young people today are inundated with high-key color and a multitude of images they thumb through on their phones all day long,” he says. “If you don’t have something new to say to a new generation, you’re not going to get their attention. I’m trying to reach them with a different language, something unique that causes them to stop and consider our history.”

representation
Manitou Galleries, Santa Fe, NM; Maxwell Alexander Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Settlers West Galleries, Tucson, AZ.

This story was featured in the August 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art August 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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