The Meyer East Gallery - Artist Biography

Time is not often listed among the artist's collection of tools such as paint and brushes, although it can be the most important tool of all. The time-consuming demands of achieving a "painterly" look are antithetical to the short attention span of the sound bite age. The slow process of blending pigments and oils is not held in favor as it once was. For an artist, choosing this authentic path of creativity makes a statement in and of itself. Suzanne Wiggin is an artist who has taken this direction.

I first saw Wiggin's landscape work in the early 1990s at a gallery on Ledoux Street in Taos. I was struck by its not resembling what is more common in the genre. It is not documentary in approach. These images are not like those of a camera. Her representation of the landscape is about the application of paint and the art of painting, not illustration. I gave further attention to her work when in the mid-1990s she was a member of Slingshot, a group of eleven young artists from Taos and Santa Fe. They shared a sense of mission and a commitment to artistic integrity, taking responsibility for what they did in and for the world as artists.

In Taos, artists from the beginnings of the art community have spoken of light as the central natural element influencing them. There are at least three layers of light commonly depicted in landscape art. The first is that of outward beauty reflecting or refracting surface luminosity. The second concerns directional light, that which passes through horizontally or diagonally on its way to somewhere else. The third is the light of underlying structure, that which appears to come from the land creating the illusion that the landscape itself is illuminated from within. Additionally, there is a light more philosophical, the metaphor of light, the light of spirituality whose existence may be inferred from the sublime nature of the depicted landscape.

While 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.

Wiggin's childhood recognition of herself as an artist led to studies that have taken her from Taos (where she has lived much of the time from age 14) to Sao Paulo, Albuquerque, Aix-en-Provence, Vermont, Utah, Santa Fe, Boston, and back to Taos. Along the way there were art scholarships, a bit of teaching, a stint of running an art gallery, a commissioned altarpiece in Chianti, participation in a number of group and one-person exhibitions--and several highly complimentary reviews. Reviewers have found in her work "fragile energies" and "soft stillness." Perhaps, but if so, then those energies are based on the vast underlying strength of nature. Soft focus does not mean lack of structure. The luminescent boundary of light in these paintings and prints connects mountains to sky horizon ("Hovering") and the beach tidal zone to an incoming fog ("Warm Coast"). In wild nature, space and time often lack a definable edge that is absolute. On the incoming tide, where does the ocean end and the land begin? Where dark clouds invade the high peaks, how can we know from our distant viewing where exactly is rock and where water vapor? These forms are structured and real and indefinite at the same time. Nature demonstrates this quality of uncertainty. The scenes in Wiggin's paintings may come from the use of imagination, but they are not imaginary.

Wiggin’s work focuses on the interplay between land and weather. Her recent efforts capture the evanescence, revealing those brief moments of the spectacular and the beautiful. "By painting from the memory of beauty, I hope to express and convey what I have become in that experience," says Wiggin. Viewing her work, one feels privileged to partake in the ephemeral, a gift of light and transience that will vanish if the viewer turns away.

Wiggin moved to Taos in 1976 from New Orleans. The decade following was a time of intense formal study for the artist. She attended Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil followed by L'Universite d'Aix-Marseille III in Aix en Provence, France. She received her BAE in Art Education and French from the University of New Mexico before receiving her MFA in 1994 from Boston University. In addition to her classical art education, she has been a dedicated student of the world, having lived in Italy and having traveled extensively. All of this experience and training informs her landscapes, evoking a sense of timeless classicism and the universal rather than the specific.

Wiggin’s work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is in many private and public collections, including the Hallmark Collection, MCI, Texaco and the Harwood Museum.