Comfort Painting

Most of the art for sale in the Ginza galleries, at least in the galleries easiest to find, falls into a single category: vaguely Impressionist paintings of flowers. Intended to provide decorative colour to domestic spaces without any unsettling hints of originality.
The messianic purveyor of "tribal" art offers something very different with the loot he buys by the suitcaseful from shady sources. He showed us the suitcases, and takes pride in the shadiness of his foreign contacts.
Another gallery we found is closer to the domestic decoration pole, but with a little more personality. I particularly appreciated the owner's willingness to say something about each of the artists. One turned out to be Pablo Picasso. But the Picasso they had on display was just one of 52 prints of an etching - signed and numbered by the big P himself, but still at the same price as everything else in the gallery: 1,000,000 yen, or 10,000 USD (Chinese-derived counting systems divide the zeroes in large numbers into groups of four).
The picture above is from that gallery. The helpful gallery owner told us that the artist, Kataoka Tamako 片岡玉子, is now a hundred years old.
"Really? When did she paint this?"
"About three years ago."
"Is she still painting now?"
"She's in the hospital these days. She wasn't feeling well."
More questioning revealed that Ms. Kataoka has been painting since she was a young elementary school teacher, but only gained recognition in her sixties (i.e. the 1960s).
Her most popular paintings are "Red Mt. Fuji" paintings like this one. As you can see, she turns the mountain into a friendly frosted jello-mold.