Diane Szczepaniak (1956-2019) was a Detroit-born painter who worked as an artist in D.C. since the 1990s. A retrospective of her work at Gallery Neptune & Brown, Meditations on Color and Light, includes a watery landscape limned in creamy oils; a large-scale, Op Art-inspired watercolor featuring cheerily colored, hand-drawn squares that communicate an oddly 3D texture; and patchwork-like assemblages of soft tones. But Szczepaniak’s most impressive works play with subtle gradations of color, created by careful layering of paint. In two works, Szczepaniak lightly spreads white highlights over understated fields of blue, creating unexpectedly radiating patterns. And in nine works that comprise the exhibit’s visual core, she replicates an L-shaped form that suggests the frame of a painting or a window. Within this repeated structure, Szczepaniak pairs tones such as magenta and various shades of blue with a dreamy subtlety that evokes the paintings of Mark Rothko, or, perhaps even more, the out-of-focus photographs of Uta Barth, some of which featured fuzzily portrayed windows into the obscure distance.
