If you haven’t already realized, Tacoma is a hotbed of sumi-e painting – and the latest show at Flow Gallery and Studios underlines the inventiveness of local artists to expand this traditional Asian brush-art with all kinds of new techniques and styles. It’s a mini-retrospective of the work of Fumiko Kimura, a renowned sumi-e artist, teacher and co-founder of the Puget Sound Sumi Artists Association, who learned her art growing up in Japan but who takes it to new levels with her latest series, “Poetry of Tea Bag Art.”

Tea bags? Yep: those thin paper bags, emptied of leaves but …

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Walk into Sandpiper Gallery off busy North 30^th Street, in Tacoma’s Old Town, and you’re struck by the serenity. Up right now is a show by three local sumi-e artists – Selinda Sheridan, Lois Yoshida and Fumiko Kimura – that takes sumi-e out of the brush and into the world of three dimensional texture and shape, but retaining its essential tranquility.

“Metamorphosis” is like sumi-plus. Traditionally, sumi-e consists of black charcoal ink sweeps over paper, occasionally with watercolors added. For the last few decades, though, American sumi artists have been pushing the genre, taking it into the abstract, the expressionist, …

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