A man crosses the desert, surrounded by cacti, rocks and traces of what might look like the old American West. Then, looking closer, something appears that shouldn’t be there: an extraterrestrial creature, a mysterious object, a supernatural presence. It is in this short circuit between the familiar and the impossible that the paintings of artist Mark Rogers take shape.
An artist and storyteller originally from Portland, Oregon, Mark Rogers now lives and works in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His painting revolves around a place that doesn’t exist on any map: the Southwestern Bellows, an imaginary land that resembles 1850s California, but where pioneers, cactus witches, wizards, paranormal creatures and aliens coexist within the same story.
The interesting thing is that Rogers doesn’t necessarily start from an image to build a story but does the opposite. He writes short tales and then turns them into paintings. The result is a narrative painting in which each scene feels like a fragment extracted from a much larger universe. In an interview with PBS, the artist said he often develops his stories in series of nine paintings: he first builds the narrative and a sort of storyboard, then translates it onto the canvas, while still keeping each work able to stand on its own.
This is how the Southwestern Bellows can host aliens that eat gold, creatures that steal humans’ nightmares, paranormal investigators and mysterious objects from who knows where. Mark Rogers draws on folklore, medieval art, history museums, supernatural tales and ufology, but he isn’t building a mythology to be taken literally. On his website he states that, although he is fascinated by UFOs and unexplained phenomena, most of his work belongs to the realm of fantasy.
And this is precisely what makes his images more interesting and more unsettling than a simple encounter between cowboys and aliens. The supernatural doesn’t burst into a completely foreign world: it is placed inside a story that seems to belong to America’s collective memory. Old landscapes, pioneer clothing and folk-tale atmospheres coexist with advanced technology and extraterrestrial life forms. Rogers names among the recurring themes of his work the contact between humans and the supernatural, the contrast between preindustrial and advanced technology, and the idea of pioneers, humans and aliens alike, grappling with dangerous and mysterious worlds.
His technique, too, contributes to this sense of an alternate past. Rogers mainly creates oil paintings on panel or canvas, building images that may at first seem almost reassuring, only to reveal more disturbing details. The artist himself describes his goal as creating paintings that are beautiful and mysterious, unsettling but also humorous. The humorous side is in fact as important as the dark one: in his tales the grotesque can coexist with absurd situations, without the image losing its fairy-tale character.
His most recent works show how this universe keeps expanding. In 2026 Rogers developed, among others, The Mystifier, a series of nine paintings built around a mysterious pyramid-shaped object that arrives in the town of Crow during a festival. Holographic images are projected from the object and, later, a figure emerges who introduces himself as a “Future Human”. In another recent work, Channeling the Intergalactic Council, the artist returns directly to the theme of contact with non-human intelligences.
Rogers thus seems less interested in imagining what an alien might look like and far more in asking what would happen if the alien were simply another inhabitant of a story. In the Southwestern Bellows, it isn’t the exception that is frightening: it is the normality of a world in which the impossible has by now found its place.
And so, behind the seemingly vintage look of his paintings, something much more contemporary opens up: a universe built entirely through storytelling, where the boundary between folklore, science fiction, the occult and comedy remains deliberately blurred.
