MFA offers our artist members the opportunity to exhibit at local restaurants around Annapolis. Currently, we work with Paul’s Homewood Café, a restaurant blending Chesapeake staples with traditional Mediterranean cuisine, and 49 West Coffeehouse, Winebar & Gallery, a place that brings art, music, and community together with great food and drink in an ambiance inspired by the traditional European coffeehouse. Please email info@mdfedart.org if you are interested in purchasing a piece of art.
View and Purchase ArtworkHarriet Smith and Jeffrey Krimmel
Now exhibiting at Paul’s through to November 2025
Harriet Smith Bio
Dr. Harriet Smith is an abstract painter driven by an unwavering passion for crafting distinctive color combinations and richly textured surfaces that transform blank canvases into dynamic visual experiences. Her artistic practice encompasses a range of materials including oil and acrylic paints and other diverse artistic mediums to create works filled with life and meaning. Her artwork has been characterized as “instinctive and melodic,” a description that perfectly encapsulates her intuitive yet purposeful approach to creativity.
Harriet draws her creative inspiration from her love of photography, music, and the limitless expanse of her imagination. This combination of influences shapes a unique artistic vision that goes beyond traditional boundaries. The precision and framing techniques found in photography inform her compositional structure, while the rhythms and harmonies of music translate into visual cadences across her canvases. Her imagination acts as the catalyst, transforming these influences into original artistic expressions.
The combination of various inspirations directly influences her approach to color techniques and layering methods. She uses thoughtfully crafted forms and strategic color placement to create artworks that engage viewers on multiple levels, eliciting both subjective emotional responses and objective aesthetic appreciation. Each painting transforms into a visual space where spontaneity and intentionality find a perfect balance.
Harriet’s artistic goal is to create vibrant energy in each piece, ensuring that every work reflects the balance between careful design and organic artistic exploration.
Statement
“Chasing Color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.00);”> is an art series that depicts the relationship between colors and emotions, revealing how different hues can evoke, enhance, and alter our emotional states. This collection features various artworks that explore how color subtly influences and reflects our feelings, leaving a lasting impression of our personal experiences.
The series includes original artwork that employs a color palette of deep, contemplative blues and purples, complemented by optimistic greens that evoke feelings of tranquility and introspection. This palette gradually transitions into vibrant reds, oranges, and blacks, which convey energy, elegance, passion, and power. It then shifts to whites, creams, and yellows, providing a sense of uplift before finally settling into the warmth of earthy browns, ochres, and grays. Each piece of art captures not only color but also an emotional essence. Through layered textures and shifting gradients, these pieces invite viewers to experience a synthesis of emotion, where seeing truly becomes feeling.
This art exploration encourages viewers to reflect on their own emotional responses to color, fostering a personal dialogue between the observer and the artwork. “Chasing Color” ultimately reveals that we don’t just perceive colors; we experience them and carry their emotional impact long after we look away. This work makes visible the often unseen connections between colors and human feelings.
Jeffrey Krimmel Bio
Artist Bio
Jeffrey Krimmel is an abstract artist, and retired elementary school teacher, from Baltimore, MD. Having drawn throughout childhood, he began painting in earnest after completing a studio art class at The College of Notre Dame in 1980; it was an exciting experience that ended up shaping his future and directing much of his life. Largely self-taught, for more than 40 years he has worked to develop a mark making vocabulary and the compositional skills and color sense needed to create paintings. It remains an ongoing process.
In recent years Jeffrey has worked with acrylics, primarily, to create smaller format pieces on canvas and wood panels with subjects found in his home gardens, through travel, in the structural forms of buildings and cities. His paintings document an artistic process in which chance, residual abandoned efforts, and deliberate marks are marshalled into coherence through use of shapes, patterns, and repetition. Whether conveying reactions or impulses, concrete objects or landscapes, the works provide clear evidence of the hand that made them.
Jeffrey’s work has been exhibited in juried shows at The Johns Hopkins Medical
School, the Circle Gallery, Maryland Hall, Lowe Office, and the Hill Center in Washington, DC. His work is also held in private collections in Baltimore, Boston, New York, and St. Louis
Statement
I create small scale multi-layered abstract paintings in response to places, in memory of people, and in meditation on what I am reading or thinking about. Freeform improvisational lines and swipes of color are starting points. Shapes, patterns, and repetition provide structure, and then work to direct the eye over the painting surface. Within this process, uncertainty and doubt are always near at hand, and success, in the building up and editing of marks and gestures, is often elusive. Nonetheless, the paintings must evolve; there is no linear route that will take them from A to Z. And, in the end an object is made, an affirmation. Painting reminds me to always remain hopeful, to believe in possibilities, and to always keep working.
Their work is on display at Paul’s Homewood Café located at 919 West St, Annapolis, MD 21401. Open daily.
