Nine Persimmons

A direct conversation with a frequently cited work in Zen-influenced ink painting — Mu Qi's thirteenth-century Six Persimmons, held at Daitoku-ji in Kyoto. By offering nine fruits rather than six, Kelly extends and complicates the source while signaling his familiarity with it. Persimmons (kaki) are an emblematic subject of Japanese still life — their orange weight and curved profiles fit naturally into the horizontal format of a print — and the fruit appears across mokuhanga history as an autumnal motif. Kelly's likely composition arrays the fruit on a flat ground, with each persimmon treated as an individuated form of slightly different shape, ripeness, and orientation, in the manner Mu Qi established. Mokuhanga's color registration allows the fruit's distinctive orange-red, the dried calyx, and the subtle bloom of ripening skin to be built up through multiple impressions. Within Kelly's still-life catalogue, the persimmon recurs as a touchstone subject, and this print's titular play on a Zen classic locates him deliberately within the lineage of Kyoto-based artists who had absorbed and reworked the canonical forms of the city's monastic art collections.