Rainier Arts Festival in Ashford

The fifth annual Rainier Arts Festival is on again in Ashford, with live music, art, food and activities for all ages at the foot of Mt. Rainier. Sept. 30-Oct. 2. Free. Whittaker’s Basecamp, 30027 SR 706 E., Ashford. www.rainierarts.com

24-Hour Comics Day

Locals join cartoon artists all over the world in 24-Hour Comics Day, a challenge to create 24 pages of comics in 24 hours. Drop in and see them scribble – or do it yourself. From 10 a.m. Oct. 1. Free. Comic Book Ink, 2510 S. 24^th Suites 15A-B, Lakewood. 253-761-4651, …

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The Tacoma Arts Commission has announced the recipients of its 2011 AMOCAT Arts Awards, given in three separate categories plus one more created for the 10^th year of the commission’s Art at Work Month. The new Arts Leadership award goes to David Fischer, executive director of arts presenter/manager the Broadway Center for the Performing Arts; the Greater Tacoma Community Foundation receive the Arts Patron award; the D.A.S.H. Center for the Arts receives the award for Community Outreach by an organization while the Community Outreach award by an artist goes to poet and filmmaker Stella …

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It’s been up awhile now, but “Impressions – Real and Imagined” is very much worth a look. Up through October at Brick House Gallery in downtown Tacoma, the show takes up two separate houses and cover two very different photographers: Ralff Somoff, whose old-school lens trickery creates a surrealist style, and Winston Swift Boyer, whose incredibly high resolution digital landscapes capture every tiny fleck of seaspray or leaf.

Boyer’s work is often inspired by his Carmel, CA environment: There are seascapes, rolling green hills, leafy forests. His enormous “canvases” are painterly, capturing landscapes at striking moments – a breaking …

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When I visited Kopachuck State Park over summer, I noticed an odd thing as I walked back up from the beach: an artist. Sitting on a stool, she was painting a little trail winding down through the forest, along with another family’s kids. The artist was Myrna Binion, and it turns out she wasn’t just painting a pretty scene but a scene that won’t look the same again for a long time. Firs and hemlocks are being knocked down at Kopachuck this fall because of root rot, but they’ll live forever thanks to artists like Binion who have captured …

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Centerstage Theatre teaches us a “Late Nite Catechism”

“Late Nite Catechism,” the nun-based stand-up comedy and longest-running show in Seattle history comes to Centerstage Theatre, with Nonie Newton-Breen as the ruler-wielding Sister. Opens 8 p.m. tonight, then 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday through Oct. 9. $27.50/$22.50/$12.50. 3200 SW Dash Point Rd., Federal Way. 253-661-1444, www.centerstagetheatre.com

Puget Sound Piano Trio plays 20^th-century chamber music

Contemporary American composers Carter Pann, Bright Sheng, Marilyn Schrude and Paul Schoenfeld will be on the program for the Puget Sound Piano Trio (Duane Hulbert, piano; Maria Sampen, violin; David Requiro, cello) this weekend at …

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Sometimes, we take our home for granted. We ignore the spectacular, march past the unique. But while we might be so used to Tacoma, visitors see it differently – and so do artists. You can see T-town through a different lens – three, actually – this Friday night at Madera Architectural Elements, as three local photographers show their unique views in a “Tripod” slide show of Tacoma sights.

Kevin Freitas, known for his work on the Feed Tacoma blog, joins professional photographer Chip van Gilder and Sharon Styer to share views of Tacoma that you …

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Since it opened, Flow gallery on Puyallup Avenue in Tacoma’s Dome district has devoted a lot of space to creative extensions of sumi-e brush painting, and the latest show “Full Spectrum”  – vibrant, mixed media work by Nola Tresslar – follows the theme.

Apart from the straight sumi-e, however, Tresslar’s work is as much a fascinating “how did she do it” puzzle as art. The artist uses a lot of recycled and found materials, but transforms them almost beyond recognition: cheap packing paper hardened into metallic chain mail, foam filler gilded and sculpted into encaustic-like bubbles, patinaed copper and rusted …

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It must be something in the air or the water – the Puget Sound region sports a lot of passionate sumi-e painters. At the forefront is the Puget Sound Sumi Artists association, which has shown regularly at the Tacoma Public Library’s Handforth Gallery and is now celebrating its 25^th anniversary with another large show there, as well as at the University of Washington Tacoma’s reference library and Mavi Contemporary gallery.

As always, the PSSA showcase a wide variety of sumi-e interpretations, from traditional Japanese and Zen to Chinese landscape and Western watercolor. Stretching around the back …

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