Brian Grimm | Passion in Paint

By Norman Kolpas

As a lightning bolt splits the sky, seven mighty longhorns stampede down a ravine in the desert southwest, fleeing a fast-approaching thunderstorm. The flash of illumination highlights the patterns and hues of their tawny hides, the elegant yet menacing curves of their horns, and the frenzied splashes of water as they cross a rushing creek. Meanwhile, in the far distance off to the right, a bright flash between the dark clouds foretells of another storm to follow.

ESTAMPIDA (Spanish for “stampede”), the 42-by-40-inch oil on board painting by Brian Grimm, conjures such a vivid vision that the scene seems to be unfolding in real time, with all the potent immediacy of a blockbuster cinematic Western. Yet, this largest of the three works he debuted on March 27 in the 25th annual Night of Artists exhibition at the Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, (which remained on view through May 10), is no hyper-realistic, IMAX-level agglomeration of super-high-resolution details. “I’m after something more impressionistic,” says the artist of the evocative painterly style he’s developed and refined during a professional career that began some 27 years ago. “And lately, I’ve been pushing myself outside the box to come up with fresh ideas, like this one, that people have not seen before.”

That determination to challenge himself and continually hone his skills, helping his talent shine brighter, has characterized Grimm’s life as an artist since he first discovered the pleasures of drawing as a first grader growing up on his family’s farm in Elgin, Texas, just east of Austin. That’s where his love for depicting nature found inspiration in the wildlife he’d spy—including rabbits, white-tailed deer, possums, skunks, raccoons and snakes—while trekking through the nearby woods with his five dogs. Back in the classroom, all the way through high school, he received support from teachers who recognized his abilities and provided the encouragement and materials, meager though they sometimes were, to help his talent flourish.

Grimm went on to earn a degree in commercial art from Austin Community College and then used his new skills to support himself as a graphic designer specializing in precisely rendered, hand-lettered and calligraphic signs—first for a local sign company and then as a freelancer. Through that initial venture into the working world, he also met Valisa, the woman he eventually married in 2003 and who, to this day, remains his staunchest supporter as well as offering a complementary, constructively critical sensibility that he values and trusts. “We are a team,” Grimm says. “She is my other pair of eyes, and we’ll go into long discussions about a painting. Goodness gracious, that is a blessing!” Valisa also encouraged him to continue pursuing his love of making art and his dream of eventually pursuing it full time.

Blessings came in other forms as well, chiefly thanks to an introduction his sister provided to one of her neighbors in the Texas Hill Country town of Kerrville: artist Ken Carlson. The renowned wildlife painter offered to critique Grimm’s works and guided him in his evolution from an illustrative to a more painterly style through the use of larger brushes that produced more expressive strokes. Grimm sold his first professional-level painting in the spring of 1999 at an outdoor show where he also met landscape artist Dalhart Windberg, who shared the critical tip that eliminating white from his palette would help him achieve livelier colors.

Over the years since, Grimm’s work has grown ever more confidently bravura, not to mention larger in scale. Yet, he continues to follow a basic approach—subject to spontaneous variations, of course—to creating a painting that essentially has not wavered from the beginning. He sums it up as a combination of “fundamentals and letting go.”

Of course, it’s not as simple as that may sound. Take, for example, his depiction of the stormy longhorn scene for the Briscoe show. A kernel of inspiration came from THE STAMPEDE BY LIGHTNING (more casually referred to as THE STAMPEDE), a 27-by-40-inch oil painted in 1908 by the great Frederic Remington that now resides in the collection of the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It depicts a central cowboy on horseback, with others behind him, attempting to control a herd of cattle as a storm rages, with one slender lightning bolt streaking down in its top-right corner. For Grimm’s painting, however, the similarity ends with the storm and the bovine subjects. He decided to give the lightning bolt greater presence, and he changed the cattle breed to longhorn. He altered the terrain from relatively flat to craggy and eliminated any visual human presence at all—“though there may be a cowboy about to come over the hill, trying to gather them back up,” he adds. With all due respect to Remington, such alterations add greater physical and emotional depth to Grimm’s painting, while inviting the viewer’s imagination to participate.

From there, he worked up thumbnail drawings of the scene. For that stage, depending on the subject, he may rely on countless reference photos he’s taken as well as pencil and paint sketches he’s made of landscapes and animals he and Valisa have seen on their travels across the places they love, ranging from the Texas and the southwest up through the Rockies and Pacific Northwest all the way as far as Alaska. (The longhorns, however, didn’t require much reference. “I do a lot of them,” he states. “They’re my animal.”)

Having selected a satisfying composition, Grimm next executed a “precision drawing, to make sure all the gestures are where I want them. If it works small, I know it will translate.” He then went on to a small black-and-white value sketch proportionate to the hardboard surface he had already selected for the final painting—in this case, on a sheet 7 by 62/3 inches—and then an oil sketch of the same size using the oils he envisions, “to see just the bold essence of what that painting is going to look like.” Once such preliminaries are concluded, he then moves on to the final work’s actual, gesso-covered board, with his oils, big brushes, and palette knife at the ready. “That’s the fun part,” he says, “because I can just let go and really paint.”

But not all of Grimm’s efforts, at this stage, necessarily involve applying paint. Sometimes—although not on ESTAMPIDA, which flowed with smooth determination from start to finish—he decides to remove some paint, and heavier equipment may be called for. Earlier in his career, he notes, “if I didn’t like something in a painting, I just wouldn’t work on it anymore.” Now, however, instead of abandoning a painting, he’ll determine the problem area and the solution it needs, wait until it has dried completely, “and I’ll take out my rotary sander and work my way down to where the board is fresh and I can see the gesso underneath.” Then, he’ll confidently repaint that part of the scene from scratch.

Occasionally, too, a painting will develop far more spontaneously. “There can be a blessing in allowing things to happen and not forcing them, [which] really resonates with my work,” Grimm says. One very appealing example came on a road trip he and Valisa made to explore the deserts of Arizona. He recalls, “It was late in the day, and I went out with my camera looking for mule deer, though I didn’t see any. We were sitting still, watching the sun go down, and peripherally, I saw a couple of cottontails running around and then just laying down in the shade.” One of those photos became his reference for the 10-by-18-inch COTTONTAIL COOL DOWN, which perfectly captures in “subtle shifts of color” the essence of watchful repose, from the rabbit’s posture to the sunlit glow through its ears to the glint of awareness in its eye. He notes, “When a painting just happens like that, it’s a true gift.”

Such gifts, well-earned through years of dedicated, focused work, are coming more abundantly than ever for Grimm. “I’ve been simplifying my life,” the artist concludes, “to allow myself the thoughtful time for a painting to really come together.”

Based in Marin County, California, Norman Kolpas is an award-winning writer, editor and writing teacher specializing in art, architecture, design, travel and food.

contact information briangrimmart.com

representationInSight Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX, insightgallrey.com.

upcoming showsWestern Visions Art Show + Sale, National Museum of Wildlife Art, September 5-27.Annual Fall Showcase, InSight Gallery, September 2026.Holiday Small Works Show, Legacy Gallery, December 2026.

This story appeared in the June/July 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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