By: Mark Jenkins

THE LATE DIANE SZCZEPANIAK (1956-2019) is probably best known as a sculptor who orchestrated light and shadow. Luminosity is also key to the Washington-area artist's watercolors, about 20 of which are on exhibit in Gallery Neptune & Brown's "Meditations on Color and Light." Among these pictures are a few that exult in a full spectrum of colors. But most feature just two hues, and occasionally only one. (The show also includes an oil, which despite a similarly limited palette is quite unlike the other paintings.)

Made between 1994 and 2015, the watercolors suggest Mark Rothko's paintings on paper, while their aqueous quality recalls Morris Louis's acrylic-stained canvases. Like the work of those predecessors, Szczepaniak's is simultaneously minimalist and lush. Simple as their compositions are, her paintings don't feel austere.

Almost half of the show's entries are in the "Dwelling" series, which were partly inspired by views of sea, sky, and land the artist experienced on a visit to Australia. These pictures frame a rectangular block of soft color within an L-shaped partial border, rendered in a different but often closely related hue. The porous doorways suggest portals to the sublime.

Less formatted but just as lustrous are a trio of paintings in which melded overlapping brushstrokes -- the title of one calls them "waves" -- coverage on a barely defined horizontal seam that bisects the all-over color field. These pictures are essentially a single hue, although yellow and pale blue undergird the dominant green of "After the Rain No. 6." That piece is the clearest illustration of the artist's layering technique. It's also altogether characteristic of Szczepaniak's ability to evoke light, landscape, and distance with nothing more than tightly arrayed streaks of watery color.