It’s the rainy season in Japan, this special exhibition is built around Daniel Kelly’s new woodblock print Slippery When Wet.
Singing in the Rain is a special exhibition that includes some of Kelly’s earliest and most rare landscape images, most famous lantern paintings and prints, koi prints and tea bowl images, many of which there is only one left available for sale.
About the artist
Daniel Kelly was born in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and grew up in great falls, Montana. Kelly decided to move to Japan over forty years ago after spending $1.95 on the only art book he could afford. In the back of this book by Tomikichiro Tokiriki was this note. “If the reader of this book ever has a chance to visit Kyoto, please feel free to contact the author.” After moving to Japan, Daniel became a pupil of Tokuriki and has subsequently had his works collected by numerous public and private collections. Among which, are The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution to name a few.
Hollis Goodall, curator of Japanese art at LACMA, wrote this about Kelly. “Kelly’s visual vocabulary is a mixture of what he saw as a young artist in the United States in 1970s San Francisco and during his trips to New York in the 1980s, and the work of Japanese or Chinese master painters, printmakers, and ceramists that he views regularly at the Kyoto National Museum of Art and elsewhere in Asia. This is part of what makes Daniel Kelly a truly international artist, listening to bebop by day and sleeping on a futon at night.” (From Daniel Kelly: an American Artist in Japan, published by Kodansha in 2010)
