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The Reverend Daphne Grimes, priest and artist, is the founder of Thomas the Apostle Center, a retreat house, located on a small ranch near Cody, Wyoming. A childhood native of Houston, with brothers Dodds and Sidney Buchannan, her lifelong interest in art was augmented when at the age of ten she won a public school city-wide contest; her reward was free weekly lessons at the Houston Art Museum until she was sixteen. Her young adult life, which included four years in Italy and travel in Europe, enhanced her artistic understanding through her exposure to the old masters and contemporary art movements.

However, a busy life with her husband, geophysicist Tommy Grimes, in North Africa and England, along with her increasing commitment to the church, limited her artwork to sketching and the occasional oil. In 1978 she and Tommy moved back to the United States and settled on the family ranch in Wyoming. It was at this time that she began the slow process toward ordination.

Following Tommy’s untimely death and her ordination, which took place almost simultaneously in 1986, Grimes turned again to art, which became a God-given way of filling the very real void in her life.

After several years as Vicar of St. Andrew’s Church in Meeteetse, a vision from her days in England began to re-emerge, and Grimes began to transform her land in Cody into a place where people could find retreat and spiritual refreshment—Thomas the Apostle Center. Two guesthouses were added to the main house, creating space for overnight accommodations, a conference room/art gallery, a multi-use art studio, chapel, and kitchen. In 1990 Ann Wafer and Mary Kauwell, friends who shared Grimes’ vision, arrived to provide the necessary woman-power to carry out the spiritual and practical development of the Center.

The proximity of a bronze foundry encouraged her to cast a bust of Tommy and another small clay figure she had made. The excitement of the casting process was a great stimulation for her work. Soon the decision to commemorate the spirit of the Center with a work of art gave her the courage to undertake an almost life-sized bronze of Jesus and the apostle Thomas for the Center grounds.

In the meantime, Grimes accumulated a small collection of Byzantine and Russian icons for the Center chapel, a reflection of her early interest in icons, which matured during visits to Russia and Jerusalem. In 1992 she enrolled in an iconography class with Philip Zimmerman, an iconographer of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Antiochan Village in Pennsylvania. She has since furthered her studies with Senora Candelas Garcia de la Parra in Mexico City. The past few years have been productive ones for Grimes, as she has begun creating icons on commission; she tries to keep to the Orthodox spirit, even when depicting saints who do not appear in the Eastern hagiography.

The movement between the discipline and detail of the icons and the greater action and freedom of expression in sculpture has been a complementary one. Of late she has again focused on oil landscapes, small palette knife impressions and larger abstract works. Here, too, Grimes finds the movement between the freedom of the palette knife and the more precise control of brushwork satisfying.

In 1995 a watercolor painting tour of Italy with Steve Quillar opened a new avenue of artistic expression for Grimes. Since then she has done a considerable number of watercolor sketches on her many travels.