DIANE SZCZEPANIAK:
MEDITATIONS ON COLOR AND LIGHT
September 7th-October 19th, 2024
Black, Blue, and Red, 1994, watercolor on paper, framed size: 40 ½ x 46 inches
gallery neptune & brown is pleased to present our first solo exhibition featuring Diane Szczepaniak’s watercolor and oil paintings. Szczepaniak’s luminous, jewel-like paintings explore the relationship between space, light, and color.
For Szczepaniak, meditation was a monumental part of her creation process, evident in her meticulous application of thousands of layers of translucent color. Through this technique, she imbued depth and her imaginings into her work, allowing the painting to transcend the two-dimensional plane and enter the realm of performance.
Szczepaniak’s large-scale colorful paintings call to mind Post-War abstract artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Agnes Martin. Most notably, one can see this connection in Szczepaniak’s minimal “colored field” paintings which she referred to as “Dwellings”. These “L” shaped paintings came to fruition during a visit to Melbourne, Australia in 1998 in which Szczepaniak was fascinated by the intersection of the sky, land, and sea.
Referring to these paintings, Art Historian Alice Gauvin states “Animated by Szczepaniak’s painstaking application of color and her ingrained understanding of the dynamics space, the forms she depicts take on a life of their own before our eyes: expanding, receding, pulsing, breathing.”
Diane drew inspiration from a myriad of visual artists, poets, musicians and the philosophical principles of Taoism: Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Isamu Noguchi, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Chopin, and Pink Floyd to name a few.
Diane was of Polish descent, born in Detroit, Michigan. Although she received her BA in economics, her interest in art came about from a summer traveling around Europe, viewing art in major European cities. Her travels solidified her desire to study drawing and sculpture under the instruction of sculptor Michael Skop. She later earned her BFA in sculpture and drawing from Northern Kentucky University and an MA from the University of Cincinnati. In the 1990s Diane moved to Washington DC and became a member of the Washington Sculptors group. She continued to teach and exhibited her work nationally. Szczepaniak’s work is in the collections of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington DC, the Cincinnati Art Museum, Americans for the Arts, and
St. Mary’s College.
For further information please contact Robert Brown: rbgal2@gmail.com
