Helen Grimm in her North Truro studio in front of Upward.
Photo: Rebecca M. Alvin
The Art of Helen Grimm
by Rebecca M. Alvin
If you look at one of Helen Grimm’s large canvases closely, you will see layers, evidence of the artist painting over previous lines and shapes, ideas she once had but has since let go of. They are not mistakes necessarily, just paths taken that lead away from the desired image, but nevertheless add to the painting. The layers are part of the painting, part of the meaning and impact of the whole. The layers matter.
“I might call myself a process painter,” explains Grimm in her studio in North Truro. “The process itself has become really important—in a lot of ways more than the end result. That circles back to this show coming up. It’s titled All the Now because it’s like the layers and layers of all those now moments you can see [on] the canvas…I’m painting over stuff, and you know, the next day it’s different, but it’s all just to be present in the now moment.”
She motions to the large canvas behind her, a piece titled Upward. “For example, this canvas has a lot underneath it. So, you know, on a certain day that I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going in with a yellow and then I’m done. That might actually be a couple of days, but underneath are many other days,” she says with a laugh.
Grimm has been painting most of her life, but she took some detours herself, becoming an herbalist and then a nurse, and having twin children. But her mother was a painter, so she knew it was a possibility for her. Also, when her parents split up, she moved with her dad to Orleans as a young child and spent her youth taking classes in Truro at Castle Hill and finding inspiration wandering around Provincetown’s gallery scene. She returned to painting after having her twins over 20 years ago, and she has been with Four Eleven Gallery in Provincetown ever since it first opened 14 years ago. Painting is an essential part of her life.
“I feel like it’s kind of soul work. It’s like the thing that some part of me that doesn’t really use words has to do “I started painting again when my kids were two, because there was something that I needed, and that’s it,” she explains. “My goal when I paint is to get out of my head and to be in my heart…Sometimes I honestly feel like I’m channeling the universe right through.”
But what happens when you don’t want to connect with the universe because things are really bad?
In 2021, one of Grimm’s twin daughters died unexpectedly at the age of 17, leading her down a dark road of grief that is every parent’s nightmare. But even as painting through that time period was difficult and the devastating loss could have completely derailed her as an artist, Grimm found her way through it by painting; it was the guiding force that helped her move through the grieving process.
She recalls she had a commission at the time but she couldn’t paint for weeks. That commission was how she got herself back into the studio to paint, something that seems like a gift to her now, a way to get through the pain.
“It was hard because one thing that happens when I’m painting is the emotions move through. But it kind of taught me, I realize, as I move through grief and all the emotions that it kind of like, washes through you and then you can release it,” she says. “It’s not that I’ve released all my grief— I can’t— somehow it helps access things and then release them…processing and releasing. That’s a huge piece of what painting is about.”
Grimm’s work is currently on exhibit at Four Eleven. It features her well-known paintings of nature subjects using organic shapes and impressions abstracted from the real, but still representational.
“I’ve always been somewhat obsessed with painting shells, even in high school,” she says.”I do landscapes, I do other things, but the shells have become abstracted in a way that has changed over the years. It’s like, it’s somehow a permission slip or something into abstraction. Like it’s not completely abstract. I’m thinking that it’s a shell, but it might be a shell in the water where the light’s all bent, or like a wave is passing, and you don’t really know what you’re looking at, but it’s still a shell or a rock.”
The show also features more representational paintings of trees. “I’ve been enjoying painting trees lately, and enjoying, like, the vertical nature of them, in contrast to the circular shell forms,”she explains, adding that while she observes them and does rough versions in the woods around her, she does the real work of painting them in her studio. “I don’t feel like my best work is the plein air version. It feels better for me, because I get stuck in my head out there. Like I try. I like going out there. It’s important to go out there and [gather] impressions and sensations of the experience. But when I’m painting out there, I’m trying to be representational in a way that backfires for me.”
Grimm says this show brings together a lot of different work she’s created. “I’ve been somewhat compartmentalizing the different work I’ve been doing, from the shell forms to the other things that I’ve been experimenting with. So, it feels kind of exciting to bring it all together in this show. I’ve been doing that little by little over the past few years. So, this feels more integrated,” she says.
All the Now, a solo exhibition of new work by Helen Grimm is on view now through July 24 at Four Eleven Gallery, 411 Commercial St., Provincetown. For more information call 617.905.7432 or visit fourelevengallery.com.
