Barrick’s paintings depict her passion for the outdoors

Release Date: 5/17/2006. Expired: 7/15/2006

“It is never too late to find your passion and practice it,” says artist Kim Canfield Barrick. “Lucky me, now I paint - and outdoors, if you can imagine that!”

Barrick’s oil paintings depicting nature and outdoor settings will be displayed in the Visual Arts Gallery of The Renaissance Center in Dickson June 2-July 15. An opening reception with the artist will be 6-7:30 p.m. June 2.

A Colorado native now residing in Tennessee, Barrick began painting as a child but only in her adult years did she seek formal instruction as she turned to art as a means of self-exploration.

She has studied with a number of acclaimed western artists, including Matt Smith, Skip Whitcomb and Peggy Kroll-Roberts. Barrick has become a sought-after instructor of outdoor painting, known as en plein air.

Her paintings are held in private and corporate collections in the United States from coast to coast as well as in Europe, including collections in Manhattan, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Denver and Germany.

Barrick is the co-founder of The Chestnut Group, plein air painters for the Land, a non-profit group of more than 100 artists and friends dedicated to preserving the beautiful open spaces of Tennessee on canvas. She is a passionate supporter of conservation efforts in both the West and Tennessee, having donated tome and artworks to numerous environmental efforts, including The Land Trust for Tennessee, The Nature Conservancy, the Harpeth River Watershed Association, Friends of Radnor Lake, Friends of Warner Parks, The Belle Meade Plantation and The Hermitage, home of President Andrew Jackson.

Barrick says the early years of her life were devoted to “what I thought I was supposed to do,” such as college (Bachelor of Science in Business Administration) and a business career.

“In the next decades, there were goals set, achieved and missed,” she says. “Beaten by the lessons life threw my way, I chose to stop the insanity by the end of my thirties. Bloodied but not dead yet, I chose, with a little grace, to slow it down.

“So in the chapter of my life titled ‘The Artist at 40+’ there is only a memory of the unfocused adolescent who was fooled into competence for a decade, then baptized by the fires of suffering. Thankfully, I was black and blue and tired enough to hear a small but clear voice speak: ‘Life just needs to be lived.’ No forecasting the future or pondering the past, just ‘be’ now.”

A collection of Barrick’s oil paintings on canvas and linen, depicting various outdoor settings from across Tennessee and other locations, including her native Colorado, will be on exhibit in the Visual Arts Gallery June 2-July 15. The gallery is open 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Saturday and both the exhibit and opening reception are free and open to the public.

For more information on Barrick’s exhibit and other displays at The Renaissance Center, contact curator Curtis Southerland at (615) 740-5519 or curtis.southerland@rcenter.org or visit the center’s web site at www.rcenter.org.

The Renaissance Center is a fine arts and technology education and performing arts center at 855 Highway 46 South in Dickson, just 35 miles west of Nashville on Interstate 40 at exit 172.

Visit the Visual Arts Gallery page for more about the gallery.

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