Morning on Main, by Dora Atwater Millikin, at the Newport Art Museum.

Glance too quickly at the paintings of Dora Atwater Millikin and you might think you’re in familiar summer-in-Rhode-Island territory. There are the usual locations, including Newport, Little Compton and nearby Westport, Mass. There are the usual subjects: boats, beaches, water. And there’s that familiar New England light — cool and clear in the morning, then turning warmer and hazier in the afternoon.

But Millikin, whose work is the focus of a handsome solo exhibition at the Newport Art Museum, has a way of confounding expectations even as she covers familiar (and in some cases, not-so-familiar) ground. A good place to start is with Millikin’s paintings of boats, a subject that clearly fascinates her and that provides the visual launching point for many of the show’s 40-plus canvases.

Sailboats, of course, have been a staple of New England marine painting since the days of Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade. But Millikin, who was born in Little Compton and certainly knows a thing or two about sailing, isn’t interested in pleasure craft. Instead, she’s fascinated by the working stiffs of the boating world — tugs, trawlers, lobster boats and the like.

A painting called Tugs, for example, features a pair of sturdy-looking tugboats, each painted from the rear so that we can see the full array of ropes, floats, turnbuckles and other gear piled on their decks. As if to dispel any lingering doubts about her nautical preferences, Millikin has placed another vessel — a sleek little sailboat — directly behind the two tugs. All clean lines and taut white sails, it looks like a haughty supermodel strolling past a pair of beefy construction workers.

Other paintings offer a similar working-class view of the Rhode Island waterfront. Commerical fishing boats, for example, turn up in several works, including Scallopers from 2005 and Fisherman’s Altar from 2007. Tugs, meanwhile, are the focus of Standing By from 2008 and The American from 2007. Though some paintings are more stylized than others — Standing By, for instance, verges on abstraction — it’s clear that Millikin feels a special kinship with these nautical workhorses.

The boat paintings also show off another side of Millikin’s artistic personality: her fascination with light and color. That interest is most evident in the upper sections of her canvases, where the boats’ overhead lines and cables are outlined against shimmering patches of sky. The effect, which varies in intensity from painting to painting, is reminiscent of stained glass.

Millikin’s blue-collar aesthetic also extends to her paintings of the southern New England coast. Rather than focusing on familiar tourist haunts like Ocean Drive and the Newport mansions, Millikin takes us to places that travel brochures often skip over. That includes the kind of middle-class beach community depicted in Morning on Main, where a gaggle of one- and two-story bungalows is bathed in lush morning light. Paintings such as First Light and The Front, meanwhile, focus on another familiar, though often overlooked, shoreline feature: the beachfront RV park.

If Millikin has weakness, it’s a tendency to overwork her paintings. Ironically, the problem is most apparent in a series of Newport scenes, where her attempts to capture some of the bustle and energy of the city’s streets end up looking merely cluttered. Likewise, a few of her boat paintings are so filled with crisscrossing lines and cables that they suggest floating Cats Cradles.

Still, these are minor complaints. As this show proves, Millikin is a talented painter who’s taken a familiar subject — the southern New England coast — and made it her own.

“Dora Atwater Millikin: Geometry of Place” runs through Aug. 10 at the Newport Art Museum, 76 Bellevue Ave. Hours: Mon.-Sat. 10-5 and Sun. noon-5 (through Labor Day). Admission: adults $6, seniors $5, students with I.D. and military personnel $4, 5 and under free. Contact: (401) 848-8200 or www.newportartmuseum.org.

Peter Diepenbrock’s current exhibit at Didi Suydam Contemporary is called “Random Order,” but an equally appropriate title (and a better oxymoron) might be “Industrial Elegance.” Why? Because Diepenbrock, a RISD-trained sculptor and industrial designer, has a knack for turning industrial-strength processes and materials into elegantly sinuous sculptures.

A case in point is Torsion #2, one of about a dozen of Diepenbrock’s works on display at the gallery, which is located at the entrance to Bannister’s Wharf. A sort of heavy-duty assemblage, it’s composed of hundreds of small rectangular pieces of stainless steel which have been neatly spot-welded on to an elegantly curved frame. The result — a kind of stainless steel Mobius strip — suggests a smaller version of one of Frank Gehry’s flamboyantly curvaceous buildings.

Diepenbrock employs a similar technique in Undulating Series #5, a big stainless steel wall sculpture. Appropriately, given the gallery’s waterfront location, the work’s billowing, undulating shapes evoke both wave forms and ocean currents. Another work, Undulating Series #6, follows a similar format but adds series of glyph-like figures to some of the steel panels.

Another interesting piece is Compression, a wire sculpture that Diepenbrock originally made for an exhibit last year at the Newport Art Museum. Back then, the spiraling strands of aluminum wire were looser and more open, suggesting a kind 3-D doodle. Here, after being compacted to about a third of its original size, the work looks more like a giant block of tinsel.

Through Aug. 12 at Didi Suydam Contemporary, One Bannister’s Wharf, Newport. Hours: Mon.-Thurs. 11-8, Fri.-Sat. 11-9 and Sun. noon-6. Contact: (401) 848-9414 or www.didisuydam.com.