When I’m paying attention, I occasionally catch word about a Yamhill County artist showing his or her stuff at the Bush Barn Art Center in Salem. So let’s kick off this week’s round-up of what’s going on arts-wise with Totem Shriver.

Shriver is an adjunct professor of 3D design at Linfield College, and he’s showing wooden relief sculptures at Bush Barn, along with pen-and-ink drawings and collages that served as the gestation phase of the ideas that found completion in 3D pieces. According to the program materials: “Totem begins each work with drawings and collages in order to discover new approaches to the carving process. His two-dimensional pieces unfold innovative ideas of positive and negative space and are featured alongside his sculptures.”

“Every day I am an artist,” Shriver writes in his artist’s statement. “Decisions about what to make and how to make it are constantly running through my mind. Art and life are the same. Aesthetic decisions, concepts, theory all need to come together. And then there is the work. New skills, old skills, materials. It is indeed a dance of sorts.” His goal is to “do the dance, make the work and put it out into the world as much as possible.”

Also at Bush Barn, there’s time to catch Jennifer Kapnek’s images of tree branches coupled with “serene, color-drenched fields,” and the 10th annual Young Artists’ Showcase, which features work by hundreds of K-12 students from Marion, Polk and Yamhill Counties. Bush Barn is at 600 Mission St. SE in Salem.

THE PORTLAND BALLET IS REACHING OUT TO NEWBERG this Friday with a free Outreach Performance at the Chehalem Cultural Center. The ballet’s “most advanced, pre-professional dancers” will do a 45-minute show featuring a demonstration of a dancer’s daily exercise routine, an opportunity for audience involvement, and performances of various repertoire selections to give folks an idea of ballet’s stylistic possibilities. The program will include selections from Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and Rip/Tide by Jamey Hampton and Ashley Rowland of BodyVox. Doors open at 7 p.m. March 23, the show starts at 7:30 p.m.

PABLO PICASSO ASKED: “Who sees the human face correctly? The photographer, the mirror or the painter?” At Marilyn Affolter’s Fine Art Gallery in downtown McMinnville, half a dozen Yamhill County artists take their best shot at answering that question in a celebration of the human (and “not-so-human,” says Affolter) called Making Faces. Look for work by Affolter along with Mike Santone, Emily Lux, Mary Rash, Benita Cole, and Amy Brodie-Scout. You’ll find the gallery, the faces, and plenty more at 325 N.E. Evans St., right across the street from McMenamins Hotel Oregon. The show runs through April 13.

Sponsor

TO WALK INTO ANY GALLERY in Yamhill County  is to be awed by the range and diversity of local artistic talent that’s in those vineyard-draped hills, and that was the case last week when I popped into the brand-new digs for McMinnville Event Center for the Arts (MECA), which has plenty of eye-popping painting, sculpture, and jewelry. One painting on the second floor used so much oil that it took a year to cure. Holli Wagner, who runs the gallery with her husband, Mick, told me she has about 260 pieces from more than 30 artists, most of them from Yamhill County. Every piece from the gallery’s two floors can be examined online, and you’ll want to keep an eye on their calendar, too, as the center starts to book music and readings. You’ll find it at 636 N.E. Baker St. Spring hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. For more info, call 503-435-0734.

FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS, gallery owners in Yamhill County are bullish on the future, and you’ll find one of those reasons upstairs at The Gallery at Ten Oaks in McMinnville. It’s the first Student Showcase, which features a couple of walls packed with the “year-long portfolio-driven” output from juniors and seniors in McMinnville High School’s Advanced Placement Studio Art course. Instructor Christine Garrison contacted the gallery, and now those students’ work is out in the world (and some is for sale). Student artists include: William McConkie, Davin Long, Orion Anderson, Carly Szedlak, Chris Wells, Iris Armenta, Julia Rue, William McConkie, Elijah Harrison, Areliz Acevedo, Laura Tuckett, Branden Ray Ward, Mercedes Philbrook, Olivia Leid, Ortiz-Beas, Zachary Reinker, Daylynn Cowan, Zoe Hayes, Gissell Rubio, and Grace Peak. The show runs from through March 31.

ARTS JOURNAL: When my son was in his picture-book years, we enjoyed several of Oliver Jeffers’ books — Stuck, The Day the Crayons Quit, and This Moose Belongs to Me, among others. So it was a delight for to stumble across an altogether different work by and about the Northern Irish, Brooklyn, NY-based artist: Oliver Jeffers: The Working Mind and Drawing Hand, published last fall by Rizzoli. Sort of a memoir — mostly pictures, artist’s notebook-type stuff, but also some text. It’s a breezy, whimsical, and amusing book that can be fully consumed in about an hour.

*

This story is supported in part by a grant from the Yamhill County Cultural Coalition, Oregon Cultural Trust, and Oregon Community Foundation.