Barbara Gruber worked as an illustrator and animator before going to art school to pursue painting. “I really wanted to paint,” she said. “It was the only thing I felt was important.” Photo courtesy of Barbara Gruber

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Baltimore painter Barbara Epstein Gruber, 67, had a discouraging start to her art career.

Her early artistic aspirations were interrupted when her mother discovered her, at age six, “going full-Rembrandt on the wall behind the living room couch. This Crayola-on-plaster endeavor went largely unappreciated,” according to Gruber’s biography on the Maryland State Arts Council website.

“I can still hear her screaming,” Gruber said, smiling, in an interview with the Beacon. “I’m sure it wasn’t the masterpiece I thought it was,” she said with a laugh. “I’m sure that I improved.”

Apparently she has. Today Gruber’s work appears in galleries and corporate collections throughout the United States and Europe. Last year the International Institute of Color and Theory in Bucharest, Romania, chose her as artist in residence.

Gruber is rooted in her hometown, though — she’s a painting instructor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and Johns Hopkins University. This summer, one of her paintings was displayed in Creative Alliance’s 30^th anniversary exhibition, near Patterson Park.

Art found a way

After a rocky start, Gruber was back to drawing as a teenager, using her parents’ walls as a canvas — with permission. She has now inherited her childhood home.

“I did a mural of Middle Earth after we moved here,” she said on a recent afternoon, gesturing to her kitchen wall, “which my mother could not wait to paint over.” (She did.)

These days, Gruber paints on canvases in her former dining room and back yard. Her recent paintings hang on the walls all over her house.

Gruber married young, at age 18, and had a son. She didn’t return to school until 1981, when she took a technical illustration, drafting and drawing course at Catonsville Community College.

“I really loved drawing, and I thought, well, that’s what I want to do. And they said, ‘Go see this teacher and ask him if he thinks you’ve got what it takes.’ He looked at my work, and he said, ‘This is not art. And you are not an artist.’”

Discouraged, Gruber decided to be a drafter instead, so she worked for surveyors and drafters for the next 15 years. Gruber got work as a technical illustrator with Architecture Engineering Inc., where she designed patches and did drawings for their reports. She eventually got a job as an animator.

“But I was always drawing,” she said. In her free time, she would paint for other people. Her boss, for instance, hired her to paint a mural on his daughter’s bedroom wall.

At the same time, Gruber started going to drawing groups, where she found opportunities to network for jobs. One of the women in the drawing groups worked at a company called Microprose, which hired Gruber, too.

“At Microprose, I realized you could learn to paint,” Gruber said, noting that most of her co-workers had studied at MICA.

“They were really wonderful painters and artists. And then all the women were fired in my department.”

Losing her job was a turning point for Gruber. When she filed for unemployment, she discovered that the state would pay for a training program. “And college was considered a training program,” she said.

So, in her 30s, Gruber went to art school. She attended MICA from 1994 to 1997. During the summer, she took courses at community college because it was more affordable. Then her health started to decline.

“Nobody knew what was wrong with me, and I was exhausted. I gained 50 pounds, and I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I thought I was going to die,” she said. “It was really scary.”

Gruber was determined to continue school despite her illness, which turned out to be hypothyroidism.

“I was going to learn to paint before I died,” she said. “It was almost as important as making sure my [teenage] son was all right.”

Misdiagnosed for years, she was relieved when she was finally prescribed a thyroid hormone. “I remember the day I woke up and knew I was going to live — and have to pay back my student loans.”

Painting indoors and outdoors

After Gruber graduated from MICA with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, she went on to get her Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College. Then she started teaching classes as an adjunct professor, while also painting portraits in her free time.

“I really wanted to paint portraits,” she said. “It was the only thing I felt was important.”

But Gruber became a landscape painter when she developed an allergy to turpentine. Again, a disadvantage turned out to have a bright side. No longer able to tolerate indoor fumes, she discovered she liked painting outside — it gave her a sense of accomplishment to complete a painting while battling the elements.

Gruber lives with her husband, Steve, and their feisty dog. After years of working full-time jobs and juggling classes, Gruber is happy to focus mainly on painting.

“My dream is to wake up in the morning — and maybe we go out for a run,” Gruber said as she wrangled her excitable puppy, “and then the only thing I have to think about is, ‘What am I going to paint today?’”