Daniel Kelly's immaculate central Kyoto atelier is empty upon arrival, but soon the artist comes bounding in, extending warm greetings before leading a quick tour of the two-floor studio-living quarters. Then we're off again, dashing around the corner to check out his kura (warehouse)-cum-art storehouse and guest quarters, then down the street to a traditional soy sauce factory that he says just must be experienced.
Kelly, 63, is a man taken up with enthusiasms that are reflected in the protean nature of his art and the bold, literally in-your-face three-dimensionality of recent works. The common thread, both in his work and his life, has been a high regard for physical craft and a self-assurance that has won his prints a place in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the British Museum and the Cincinnati Art Museum.
During his three decades in Japan, he has appropriated Japanese motifs like paper lanterns and dappled with koi in his work, but for their figurative qualities rather than to make a particular cultural or aesthetic statement. He remains, as the title of his recent publication attests, a very American artist in Japan, and like the expat painter played by Gene Kelly in "An American in Paris," you could easily picture him dancing about the neighborhood.