|
|
Kim Douglas Wiggins grew up on a ranch in southern New Mexico. His father was a noted photojournalist traveling the world on assignment for major magazines like Sports Illustrated, Argosy and Look. His mother was a rodeo cowgirl with a love for art. Wiggins began his art career sculpting miniatures of the wildlife around him. At age twelve, an art dealer visiting his father’s ranch discovered his budding talent and soon began marketing his work in Scottsdale, Arizona. By the time Wiggins was fourteen, he was painting in oil and working nights and weekends as a graphic artist for a national equine magazine. At the age of 17, he enlisted in the U. S. Army, and after graduating from high school he served in the military from 1977 through 1982. During this time he was stationed in Germany for three years where he pursued college at night and studied art by immersing himself in the major museums of Europe. After leaving the Army he continued his education at Eastern New Mexico University and later furthered his study under Henriette Wyeth at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Although primarily self-taught, he was encouraged to pursue his unique style through guidance from regional masters such as Wyeth, Alexandre Hogue and William Lumpkins.
In 1985 Wiggins was admitted as the youngest member of the Society of American Impressionists (SAI). His first impressionistic landscapes sold for under $1000 dollars. The following year he received a painful epiphany as he took part in the national exhibition in St. Louis. As he viewed the massive exhibition he mistook another artist’s painting for his own work. This shocking experience launched a three-year quest to find his own identity as an artist and resulted in the passionate style that now sets his work apart. As Laurie J. Rufe, former Director of the Tucson Museum of Art states, “Like Van Gogh, Wiggins' style is based on a pictorial language of heavily impastoed brushwork, bold color, and dynamic surface movement. Wiggins draws upon Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, American Regionalism, and muralist and folk art traditions, and it is this union that makes his paintings truly unique and unexpected.”
Throughout the 1990’s Wiggins’ subject matter continued to expand.
Southwestern landscapes, still life, cityscape and symbolic images soon found there way into his oeuvre. By 1997 he was commissioned to do his first historical work, Merging Cultures on the Santa Fe Plaza. This 60 x 84 inch work is housed in one of the premier Western Art collection in the world, the Anschutz Collection in Denver. Soon Wiggins’ historical works made up a significant portion of his body of art. In 2005 his monumental work, Lewis & Clark Among the Mandan, sold for just under $50,000 and is now in the permanent collection of the Autry National Center in Los Angeles. The same year Wiggins completed a series of ten historical works depicting the history of California. This collection of ten paintings now hangs at the Staples Center in Los Angeles and is used as the backdrop for many of the interviews done backstage including the 2011 Grammys. By 2007 Wiggins had his first one-man show in New York City. This show featured over 30 cityscapes of Manhattan in a set entitled, The Gotham Series. These works ranged in size from 9 x 12 inches to 60 x 60 inches.
In 2010 Wiggins’ work entered a new phase as his passion for his Western heritage and love for our vanishing wildlife lead him to stretch his boundaries even further. His complex work, Prairie Fire, was featured at the 2011 Masters of the American West exhibition at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles. This work depicted hundreds of buffalo and other animals stampeding across a vast prairie with a fire engulfing the background. Although his subject matter and complexity continue to expand, his vibrant landscapes of the Southwest remain his predominant mainstay. His heartfelt passion for the American West and its vanishing way of life is translated through vivid images meant to keep the spirit of the West alive. His belief that the artist is the soul of a society drives him to chronicle elements of our own culture through the focal point of his own unique vision.
Wiggins exhibits yearly at the, Masters of the American West show held at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, CA. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, NM, the Anschutz Collection, Denver, CO; the Staples Center, Los Angeles, CA; the Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA; and the Autry National Center, Los Angeles, CA. His work was recently included in Painters and the American West, an exhibition that traveled from the Denver Art Museum to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Joslyn Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.
|
