Sumida was born to a American-born Japanese parents. Born in 1948 and raised with two sisters in a working-class Watts community of Los Angeles, Sumida, who is self-taught and sold his first painting to a gallery at age 15, has gone on to defy expectations in any number of ways. An artist equally confident with gouache, charcoal, watercolor, oil, and egg tempera, he is known for powerful realist western landscape paintings and for beautifully observed scenes of Crow and Shoshone Indians. He is also esteemed for vividly impressionistic, ineffably spiritual pieces depicting mermaids and for Asian-inflected pieces that speak of simplicity. Sumida’s work is so wide-ranging that attendees at one of his recent one-man exhibitions told the gallery owner they were certain they had just seen a two-man show...

Source: http://www.gregorysumida.com