Artist DiAnn Grimes says she works to be perceived on many levels.
Written By Donna Engle, Photos by: Phil Grout
Farms and fields that once stretched over the hills and valleys of Carroll County live on in the watercolor paintings of Di Ann Grimes. In her art, ducks parade near ponds, cows stand in meadows, shadows slant across painted barns and clapboard farmhouses.
The award-winning artist’s love of all things agricultural has its roots in the Hampstead farm owned by her grandparents, Doss and Pansy Garland, where Grimes spent many childhood hours. She was born in Westminster and grew up in Cockeysville, but the farm holds memories of feeding chickens and hogs, picking fruit and helping with farm chores.
“You’ll see in my painting: I love farms, farm animals, trees. Carroll County being an agricultural county is just wonderful fodder for my work,” she said. She never wanted to be a farmer, “but I loved the scenes, the nostalgia of it,” she said.
Grimes, 68, returned to Carroll County after she retired in 2003 as creative services manager for the U.S. Superintendent of Documents. She and her husband, sculptor Hans A. Baum, live in Carroll Lutheran Village near Westminster. Baum, also retired, was art director for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Grimes juggled two careers. By day, she worked at jobs that provided outlets for her creative talent.
“While my 9 to 5 career was going on, I was painting all the time, evenings, weekends, vacations,” she said.
“At an early age,” wrote Grimes in a statement for this article, “I loved order and drawing. I was intrigued with the commonplace because I saw simple shapes and patterns that held a certain poetry for me. Thus I started to strive to paint the feelings and ideas that I observed.”
Grimes’ work gained recognition when she was still in high school. From her first professional exhibit in a Baltimore City art gallery at age 16 to an artistic excellence award received two months ago in a show at the Carroll County Arts Center, her art has won awards and been given solo shows.
Behind the artist stood her mother. Louise Garland Grimes encouraged her daughter to enter contests and shows. Louise Grimes, who began painting at 80, won a national award for senior artists. She died in December 2009.
In high school, Grimes learned academic watercolor, in which the artist uses no white other than that of the paper. She occasionally paints in oils, but handles them in such a way that the finished pictures resemble watercolors.
Grimes majored in painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she was a lone realist working in watercolors among students who were following the expressionistic, abstract styles that were popular in the art world of the 1960s.
“I like the spontaneity and freshness of watercolors,” Grimes said. “It’s not like oil. You can’t go back and paint over [a mistake] and correct it.” While oil painters can work in sections, she enjoys the challenges of controlling color and amount of moisture and working with the whole surface at once.
At MICA, he was inspired by instructor John B. Sutton, who asked her to think about what she wanted to paint.
“She had real direction in her work,” Sutton said. “The art world was going in another direction, and it took a lot of courage for her to go her own direction and paint in her way,” he said. Sutton retired from MICA in 1987 as dean of students.
“As with poetry,” Grimes wrote in her statement, “I work to be perceived on many levels. The obvious subject matter, painterly qualities, subtle implied meaning and finally reaching for that intangible quality that invites the viewer to project and connect with an understated image–ultimately giving the painting a kind of beauty, truth and affinity with the observer.”
Grimes graduated from MICA with honors in 1964. Her early day jobs allowed her to acquire skills in printing, illustration and marketing that prepared her for later work in marketing with the U.S. Travel Service, serving as art director for U.S. Savings Bonds and designing coffee table books such as “A History of the United States Capitol” for sale by the Government Printing Office.
A “best in show” award from the Baltimore Watercolor Society in Grimes’ final year at MICA opened doors. Art consultant Eleanor Abell Owen saw one of Grimes’ paintings on display.
“I was absolutely struck by it,” said Owen, who has since retired. “The clarity of it, realistic but with beautiful coloring and true to life. Landscapes, lots of animals.”
The two formed a long-lasting business relationship. Owen placed Grimes’ work in the collections of corporations such as Black & Decker and Monumental Life Insurance Co. The state government owns her painting of a skipjack in Annapolis Harbor with the State House in the background. Much of her art has been purchased by private collectors. When Owen opened a gallery in Ruxton in 1982, Grimes was one of five artists she featured.
“She was wonderful to work with, a delightful person,” Owen said. Grimes did not display the difficult temperament and demand for top billing that characterizes some artists, Owen said.
Grimes sought to learn marketing and business advertising when she applied in the late 1960s to an advertising agency in Washington. When she arrived for the interview, Baum opened the door. Her first thought was, “That’s the best-looking man I’ve ever seen.” Her second thought: “Forget it. He’s probably married and has two kids.”
She got the job. She and Baum worked together for a year, but he never asked her out. She accepted another job. Shortly afterward, a mutual friend from the agency threw a party. Grimes did not want to drive from the party back to her apartment in Arlington, VA. Having learned that Baum was single, she asked him to take her home. He picked her up, took her home and accepted her invitation to visit her family over Labor Day. That weekend, he asked her to marry him. They had never dated, but she said yes. They celebrated their 43rd anniversary in October.
Her husband has supported her career. He has a good eye for what does not work in a painting, she said. When she works late, absorbed in her art, he cooks dinner so she can continue.
To Sutton’s question of long ago, “What do you want to paint?” Grimes’ answer is, “something that will enhance people’s lives, a happy event to lift spirits, or something peaceful, or something that you would see differently each time you look at it.
“I love simplicity of statement,” she wrote, “spoken in soft and innocent scenes of quietness, peace and contentment. Whatever I produce, whether intimacy, irony or whimsy, hopefully strong composition, pleasing color and poetry will beckon for a deeper look.”
Her best work, she said, is still ahead.
