Ken Grimes (born 1947) is an American artist from

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. He was raised in

Cheshire, Connecticut Cheshire ( ), formerly known as New Cheshire Parish, is a town in New Haven County, Connecticut, United States. At the time of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census, the population of Cheshire was 28,733. The center of population of Connecti ...

and creates his art at Fellowship Place in

New Haven New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,02 ...

Connecticut Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its cap ...

. Grimes is widely considered to be an

outsider art Outsider art is art made by self-taught or supposedly naïve artists with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates e ...

ist. Grimes' artwork consists of

monochrome A monochrome or monochromatic image, object or palette is composed of one color (or values of one color). Images using only shades of grey are called grayscale (typically digital) or black-and-white (typically analog). In physics, monochrom ...

drawings and paintings, typically consisting of white text and diagrams on a black background. His art deals with themes of

coincidence A coincidence is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances that have no apparent causal connection with one another. The perception of remarkable coincidences may lead to supernatural, occult, or paranormal claims, or it may lead t ...

outer space Outer space, commonly shortened to space, is the expanse that exists beyond Earth and its atmosphere and between celestial bodies. Outer space is not completely empty—it is a near-perfect vacuum containing a low density of particles, pred ...

extraterrestrial life Extraterrestrial life, colloquially referred to as alien life, is life that may occur outside Earth and which did not originate on Earth. No extraterrestrial life has yet been conclusively detected, although efforts are underway. Such life might ...

, and

UFOs An unidentified flying object (UFO), more recently renamed by US officials as a UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon), is any perceived aerial phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. On investigation, most UFOs are id ...

. Grimes received a

Wynn Newhouse Award The Wynn Newhouse Award is an annual prize given to disabled artists in recognition of their artistic merit. History The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, a charitable organization founded by newspaper entrepreneur Samuel Irving Newhouse, Sr., inaugur ...

for his work in 2013.

Mental illness

Grimes was diagnosed with

paranoid schizophrenia Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically Auditory hallucination#Schizophrenia, hearing voices), delusions, and disorganized thinking. ...

while in his twenties, leading to his withdrawal from college. He was hospitalized five times between 1971 and 1978.

References

External links

* ''Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology'', 1947 births Living people American outsider artists American male painters 20th-century American painters 20th-century American male artists 21st-century American painters 21st-century American male artists People from Cheshire, Connecticut Painters from New York City Painters from Connecticut People with schizophrenia {{US-painter-1940s-stub