While Suzanne Wiggin's art has been variously categorized by critics over the past decade, the work in the current exhibition may be thought of as having an affinity with the Luminists, the pre-Civil War school of Hudson River painters such as George Inness in whose compositions landscape dissolved into atmosphere. There are also echoes of drama from James Whistler's nocturne series and recognition of the American approach to landscape of Albert P. Ryder. Wiggin's painting has enough of a modern feel, however, that it cannot be mistaken for something from the nineteenth century. Successful painting must be of its time if it is to aspire to transcending its time, that is, it must be modern for all that it acknowledges the past. It is here where physical light and metaphoric light find their connection. The Luminists depicted light as much as a living element of the natural environment as trees and rivers. The philosophers of Transcendentalism, such as Emerson and Thoreau, contemporaries of the Luminists, felt that the very property of being, including the being-ness of nature, represented or was in itself a recognition of the existence of a higher order. The transcendent view of both Luminists and philosophers finds a modern interpretation in the landscapes of this exhibition. This artist appears to have been headed on this path for a considerable time.