Growing up as the self-professed “weird art kid” in Roswell, New Mexico, Jim Vogel comes from a family of storytellers, a background that now pervades his own artwork. At home in the heart of New Mexico, Vogel paints scenes of New Mexican myth and folklore in an attempt to “put images to these stories I’ve heard over and over from my mother and father.” Reminiscent of Thomas Hart Benton’s social realist and regionalist works, Vogel’s narrative paintings feature frequently New Mexico’s working-class and rural poor in an attempt to relate the common man’s struggle. In addition to his paintings, Vogel creates elaborate, handmade frames to enhance his scenes. Based in Dixon, New Mexico, Vogel participated recently in “Taos Six Collection: An Homage to Joseph Henry Sharp” at the Blue Rain Gallery, in which he showed his work Matching the Color of Sangre de Christo, after Joseph Henry Sharp’s The Old Santos Mender.

The frame for Buffalo Wings was made in collaboration with his wife, Christen Vogel.

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