Goebel belongs to the second wave of contemporary Taos painters — the cohort that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, that drew on both the original Taos Society's commitment to the New Mexican landscape and on the broader American post-Impressionist and plein-air tradition, and whose work has continued to define the contemporary Taos painting tradition into the twenty-first century.
Goebel came to art from outside the established Southwestern painting community. His Texas birth and the educational path that took him through the University of New Mexico and the Colorado Institute of Art gave him a broad regional foundation rather than a single dominant teacher or studio lineage. The decision to settle in Taos placed him within one of the most active American art communities of the late twentieth century, and he built his working practice in close engagement with that community across the next two decades.
His mature work concentrated on the Southwestern landscape — the high desert in changing light and weather, the adobe villages and mission churches of the Rio Grande valley, the surrounding mountain country — but extended in parallel into portraiture, the figure, and still life. The handling of paint owed an obvious debt to the European Post-Impressionist and American plein-air traditions, with a thick, gestural brush, saturated palette, and a strong commitment to painting from direct observation.
His role as a founding member of the contemporary Taos Six placed him at the centre of the new generation of working Taos painters of the late twentieth century. The group took its name from the original Taos Society of Artists' six founders but represented a contemporary cohort organized around shared exhibition and promotion within the regional and national gallery system. His election as an Academician of the National Academy of Western Art further established his standing within the institutional Western painting world.
The later years of his career added a substantial teaching practice. Goebel became a respected master teacher of younger landscape painters, and his influence on the next generation of working Taos and Southwestern artists extended his impact beyond his own paintings. The features that ran in the principal Southwestern art magazines during these years brought his work to a national audience of Western painting collectors.
His unexpected death in 1993, at the age of forty-seven, cut short what was widely expected to be a long mature career. The body of work he left — paintings, drawings, and a substantial number of plein-air studies and finished landscapes — has continued to be exhibited and collected steadily in the decades since his death, and his position today is that of one of the most accomplished younger painters of the late twentieth-century Taos tradition.