Diane Szczepaniak’s paintings were created through a slow process of accumulation, rather as
sedimentary rocks take form. Layer upon layer of translucent watercolor washes across the
fibrous surface of the paper—"more layers than is rational,” the artist herself declared—as the
painting gradually unfurls into luminous being. Through this repetitive painting process, which
calls to mind the tantric exercise of making mandalas practiced in Buddhism, Hinduism, and
Shinto, Szczepaniak aimed to create spaces that contain elements of pure existence, independent
of rational interference, interpretation, or expectation. Animated by Szczepaniak’s painstaking
application of color and her ingrained understanding of the dynamics of space, the forms she
depicts take on a life of their own before our eyes: expanding, receding, pulsing, breathing.
Diane Szczepaniak was born in 1959 in Detroit, Michigan. As an artist, she engaged with and
drew inspiration from the diverse creative and philosophical traditions pouring into postwar
America and reinvigorating American art. She drew stimulation and source material from visual
artists like Kandinsky, Klee, Noguchi, Rodin, and Maillol yet her work also gives serious
consideration to the poems of Wallace Stevens (whose “Sunday Morning” inspired a painting
series of the same name), Georg Trakl, and Wisława Symborska; the music of Satie, Chopin,
Chick Corea and Pink Floyd; the philosophical tenets of Taoism; and treatises on architecture
and neuroscience.
Szczepaniak’s early career was dedicated to drawing and sculpting the figure under the tutelage
of the sculptor Michael Skop, who was in turn studio assistant to Ivan Meštrović, a friend and
colleague of Rodin. Decades later, Szczepaniak would continue to reference Rodin’s innovative
spatial aesthetics when approaching her own work. In 1981 she earned her BFA from Northern
Kentucky University, followed by her professional welding certification in 1982, and,
subsequently, began to show her figurative sculptural work, as well as early still life and
landscape paintings, at venues in Michigan and Kentucky. In the 1990s, Szczepaniak moved to
the Washington D.C. area with her family, where she continued to exhibit work and became
affiliated with distinguished arts-focused associations such as the Washington Sculptors Group
and the Washington Project for the Arts.
Interrogating form and space was her abiding concern from the first; this preoccupation would
continue to manifest and mature over the course of her artistic career. “Early on,” she remarked
in an interview, “I noticed changes in the way my mind and body feel after spending time
looking at space… My goal became to eliminate the clutter, what people often refer to as ‘noise,’
in my consciousness.” Using this meditative creative framework, she sought to understand and
convey what she referred to as the “essence of being” through her manipulations of colors and
forms in space.
Indeed, one can perceive an elemental ethos in Szczepaniak’s artwork, particularly her self-styled
“dwellings”: dilute washes of watercolor creating a wide L shaped form flanking the paper or
canvas, sometimes crisply defined, but more often emerging softly from the fluid center like an
indistinct form in an auroral sky. This formal motif first appears in 1998, when Szczepaniak was
painting in Australia. “It was there,” she recalled, “that I saw the sea, the land and sky all meet in
the form of a three dimensional ‘L,’ and the paintings that were once multiple rectangles and
squares merged into a space, defined by a forward or backward ‘L’ form.” This form, the
abstracted encounter of land, sea, and sky, became a chant-like refrain throughout the rest of
Szczepaniak’s career, and would serve as a vector for some of her most sophisticated
experiments with surface, space, depth and color.
These “dwellings” contemplate the simultaneous separation and unification brought about by the
lines dividing forms—concerns they share with Barnett Newman’s iconic “zip” paintings. Yet,
notwithstanding their abstract rigor, they are evocative works in which sense, memory, and
imagination play an integral role. In “Gentle Wind, Joyous Lake IX” the color-play is
particularly suggestive: translucent layers of Tyrian purple, carmine, burgundy and indigo
express the familiar backwards L, a misty form that seems to have emerged organically, as
though somehow secreted from within the paper instead of imposed upon it. Perhaps this
impression is augmented by a subliminal association with the Murex snail and the cochineal
created by the artist’s palette, lending the familiar composition an almost primordial character.
And yet, the geometry of the form—however hazily expressed—suggests a rational presence,
some kind of guiding architectural hand, and the wine-purple color-scape could easily suggest
richness, luxury, royalty. While Szczepaniak eschews human narrative in her work, these painted
worlds activate the senses and awaken the memory, engaging intimately with human experience.
In fact, to really see these paintings is a necessarily meditative and intensely personal process.
Organic forces seem to animate much of Szczepaniak’s work—no mere accident, as the artist
continually turned to the natural world for creative inspiration. When she first started abstract
painting, she used the seasons to guide her experiments with watercolor grids as she trained in
form and color. Decades later, she stated that gardening— “an activity that parallels
sculpture”—sharpened her ability to observe the ever-evolving worlds of insects, flowers and
trees. One perceives this keen interest in the processes of the natural world – in all its turbulence
and uncertainty – throughout much of Szczepaniak’s work. In one painting, “One Jade Sphere –
Transmitting Light” dappled rings of light play across a subtly undulating russet background,
while a single spot of ghostly jade seems to sink into the reddish abyss before our eyes. This
work strikes me as a picture of existential flux – a creeping, magma-like heat steals horizontally
across the paper and among the spheres, creating an imbalance, a pervasive sense of coming and
going, suggesting competition and disorder within the picture space.
Another work, “After the Rain No. 5,” presents horizontal striations of color pulling away from
each other along a partially-realized line that bisects the painting vertically. Flashes of electric
pink are suddenly subsumed by deeper, muddier reds, golds and blues or pale, indeterminate
slices of greyish yellows and flesh. Energy pours outwards towards the edges of the canvas with
the vigorous, painterly strokes, some of which breach the central barrier like water rushing over a
dam. In this work, Szczepaniak shows her command of her materials, exploiting the transparency
of watercolor to heighten the sense of movement and tension across the brilliantly contrasting
horizontal bands of color.
Revisiting Szczepaniak’s “dwellings,” I was reminded of the paintings of Agnes Martin,
particularly her work from the 1970s inspired by the arid landscapes of New Mexico. This is
unsurprising, perhaps, given the two artists’ overlapping interests: the influence of Taoism upon
their work, their mutual affinity for music, and their close spiritual engagement with the natural
world. Szczepaniak’s “Yellow and Blue Dwelling” and “Dwelling No. 10” call to mind Martin’s
small watercolors on paper from 1977, in which the graphite lines are visible, the merest stain of
pigment is washed over the paper, and the almost-smooth surfaces bear subtle witness to the
touch of the painter’s hand. Another artist who comes to mind when considering Szczepaniak’s
dwelling paintings is Mark Rothko, particularly his luminous works on paper. The two artists
converge in their commitment to experimentation using repeated forms, their evident pleasure in
juxtaposing color, and the subtle richness of their layered watercolor surfaces.
Szczepaniak continued to work and exhibit steadily in the Washington D.C. area until her death
in 2019 after a battle with cancer. In the few years preceding, she had been exhibiting more
frequently and garnering more critical attention than ever before. This exhibition rightly revives
the oeuvre of a sensitive and accomplished artist, whose cerebral approach to her subject—which
could be described as form itself—adds to rather than detracts from the meditative beauty and
enigmatic appeal of these paintings.