>Baker City Herald | Baker County Oregon's News Leader

Baker City watercolorist Rose Fisher is the featured artist this month at The Sycamore Tree, 2108 Main St.

Fisher grew up in Eastern Oregon. Though she always liked to draw, she said she never had an opportunity to take any painting classes.

Then, while living in California, she signed up for an adult education class.

“I enrolled in a watercolor class and was hooked. I found a passion that until then I had never known existed,” she said.

Her subjects include birds, leaves, elk, florals — “everything but landscapes.”

Poet and essayist Rob Whitbeck will conduct a series of three-hour writing workshops at the La Grande and Baker City public libraries this Friday and Saturday.

The intensive workshops are geared toward writers of all levels and will focus on “writing home” — exploring and creating work rooted in the northern West, and in Oregon in particular.

Whitbeck will encourage participants to place themselves in the larger history, and literary history, of the region.

Crossroads Carnegie Art Center’s 10th annual “Art at the Crossroads” opens Friday, Sept. 5, and there’s still time to enter up to three original pieces.

This regional art event is open to professional and amateur artists, 18 years and older. Each artist may submit up to three original pieces completed in the last two years and not previously shown at Art at the Crossroads.

Categories include: two-dimensional, sculpture, photography and fine crafts.

The entry fee for up to three pieces is $15. Cash prizes and ribbons will be awarded. Art needs to be delivered to Crossroads on Sept. 1 and 2, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Whit Deschner is encouraging everyone to “get your licks in now” for the second annual Great Salt Lick Contest.

The event works like this: enter salt blocks that have been licked into artistic forms and you might win some money.

All entered salt block sculptures will be auctioned Sept. 27 with proceeds going to the Parkinson Center of Oregon at Oregon Health & Science University.

Salt lick entries must be submitted by Sept. 18. The blocks can be delivered to Crossroads Carnegie Art Center, 2020 Auburn Ave., or those who want a replacement salt lick can take entries to Oregon Trail Livestock Supply in Baker or Richland Feed and Seed in Richland. There’s a limit of two per person.

The Baker County Library will host an Oregon Chautauqua program titled “Food for Thought” at 1 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 30, at Mad Matilda’s, 1917 Main St.

The event is free and open to the public.

The presenter is essayist and radio commentator Diana Coogle, who will discuss the many ways we view sustenance.