Over the next few months, as you enter the spacious Barker Gallery at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, you will be faced with a large oil painting that appears to depict a totem pole in a wetland on the Oregon coast.

But look again, and it’s no ordinary totem pole. Oregon painter Michael Brophy’s “Beaver Trade” shows a tree trunk with an animal face carved at the bottom but above it the imprints of a lumberjack’s caulking boots leading up.

Paul Sutinen interviews painter Michael Brophy about drawing as a kid, the beginning of his clear-cut forest paintings and his practice as a painter

Russo Lee Gallery: Meanwhile, this Portland, Ore., gallery serves up some maverick work that includes Jo Hamilton’s portrait of Las Vegas types (“Uncle Dougie & John Muhato”) made from mixed crocheted yarn, Michael Brophy’s photorealistic oils on canvas of Oregon lava fields and Samantha Wall’s eerie graphite-and-conté-crayon-on-paper experiment in double vision, “Second Sight.”

Just under two years ago, a discarded pile of smoldering charcoal ignited a fire that ripped through and eventually destroyed Michael Brophy's North Portland painting studio.