For our April exhibition, we invited four artists to explore the expressive power of color in art with “Color My World.” From April 4th to the 26th, this vibrant showcase brings together scenes with vivid hues, imaginative colors, and mind-bending investigations into color theory. The exhibit includes fluorescent landscapes produced by Jan Crooker, Ann Guidera-Matey, Catherine Martzloff, and Pritha Srinivasan.   

 

    Jan Crooker is an artist and teacher and has been involved in the visual arts her entire life. She has art degrees from Toledo University and Penn State. She taught at the Toledo Museum of Art, Penn State, Cal State San Bernardino, Moravian University, and Northampton Community College. She has exhibited nationwide and is known for her colorful paintings. She has a studio in Bethany Beach, Delaware, and posts a painting daily on Instagram. Jan’s style evokes early 1900s modernism, with her pieces featuring elongated horizons, abstracted trees, and wispy waterways. Her acrylic palette embraces shades of lavender, ochre, and azure.

 

    Ann Guidera-Matey has been working with pastels for approximately 35 years and has her studio in Aston, PA. Pastel is her primary medium, choosing it for its immediacy, saturated hues, and ability to capture glowing light. She is inspired by Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the New Jersey coast, the Brandywine Valley, and more. Her landscapes evoke the feelings of harmony and balance found in nature. Deep hues, vast environments, and visual texture invite observers into Ann’s world, where you can pause, take a deep breath, and savor the moment. The artist’s pastel works are intensely saturated with fiery blood oranges, strong violets and pinks, and electric teals.  

 

    Based in New Jersey, Catherine Martzloff has been painting for over two decades.  Her work has evolved in recent years toward bold color relationships and a more distilled visual language. Vintage objects, patterned surfaces, and simplified forms often appear in her still lifes, creating compositions that balance structure with intuition. Catherine’s style is two-dimensional and geometric-focused, giving her pieces an almost cubist aesthetic. The three works she is including in this show are varied in subject: one is a floral portrait, another is a river scene, and the last is a still life. Her tones, while still rich, are more muted and unidimensional. 

 

    Pritha Srinivasan returns to the gallery again in April after having shown in our March exhibition. Pritha is a Mid-Atlantic self-taught contemporary artist who has been creating art since childhood. Her award-winning figurative and nature-based watermedia artwork celebrates the wonders within and the fleeting moments we share on life’s collective journey. She uses watercolor and acrylic to convey her unique narrative, deeply influenced by her cultural heritage, travels around the world, literature, and an abiding love of nature. By combining dynamic color with detail, her artwork transforms both the mysterious and familiar into something radiant and visionary. Her landscapes blend contrasting shades through sharp brush strokes, making her scenes teeter between realism and impressionism.