Grimes was born in New York City on July 16, 1947, a day that correlates—the artist is apt to point out—with other significant world events, including the first moon landing and the first A-bomb detonated in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1943. When he was still very young his family moved from Manhattan to Westchester County, a suburb of Tampa, Florida, and back to New York City again before settling, when Grimes was six years old, in Cheshire, Connecticut, where he still resides.

Grimes’s grandfather, a semiprofessional magician and inventor, left a long-lasting impression on the young Grimes.The artist was first moved to deal with the paranormal, creatively, by an extraordinary circumstance. He discovered that the same time he was working at a public lottery in Cheshire, another Ken Grimes, sixty-two years old and living in Cheshire, England, won the largest soccer pool in history. This as well as many other coincidences have become part of what Ken refers to as the "Coincidence Board."

Since the Cheshire, England/ Connecticut coincidence in 1971, Grimes’s paintings have gone through a number of media and styles, but he has diligently maintained a theme of alien intervention, space signals, synchronicities, and government cover-ups. He paints only in black and white, which he maintains is the most direct way of showing the contrast between truth and deception. These bold white-on-black graphics have become more iconographs than pictures. Sometimes a written statement will take up most of the piece, as if to remind us of the painting’s true purpose.

"The sooner we start a pattern of global awareness and formulate a response to ‘side affects,’ the easier it will be to make the transition between a human-centered view and an alien perspective," Ken Grimes.