AMNA NAWAZ: Artist Alex Katz is an American great who just celebrated his 99th birthday.

And what better way to celebrate than an exhibition in Nice, France this fall, entitled Henri Matisse-Alex Katz?

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown recently visited Katz at his home in Maine for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

JEFFREY BROWN: Alex Katz is best known as a painter of people, often his friends, very often his wife, Ada, and of nature, especially the woods and water around him in his summer home near the coast of Maine.

Painting for him is about capturing what he's called quick things passing.

What does that mean, quick things passing?

ALEX KATZ, Artist: It's a way of being in the present tense.

JEFFREY BROWN: In the present tense.

ALEX KATZ: Yes.

Get outside yourself and move.

JEFFREY BROWN: At age 99, as we saw in his studio recently as he showed us his latest work, the movement is certainly slowed, but the art, mind and magic continue as he looks out at Coleman Pond to scenes he's painted for decades, a group of trees, a swimming raft on the pond., further afield, the dramatic coast as seen from above and in this painting.

ALEX KATZ: You're trying to capture time and light.

You just feel it.

You feel what you don't like, you feel what you do like, and you feel what a painting should be like.

JEFFREY BROWN: He's also looking back at the young man who set out so long ago to conquer the world from his childhood in Queens and early years of art making in the downtown Manhattan scene.

ALEX KATZ: I had a real connection with myself and painting.

And I said, well, we're going to go -- we're going to go for it flat out.

And I did.

JEFFREY BROWN: As a young man in the 1940s, he started drawing, a lifelong practice now being celebrated in an exhibition at the nearby Colby College Museum of Art, subway riders, dancers for his work with the choreographer Paul Taylor, flowers, and much more.

He first came to Maine in 1949 to attend the renowned Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

And five years later, he and Ada bought this house.

On the day of our visit, Katz was joined by his son, Vincent, twin grandsons and friends, the kind of scene that shows up in his work.

And he still sometimes works here in the original studio attached to the house.

He draws and paints what he sees, but then refines the image in repeated renderings, as seen in this 1978 documentary, from small sketches building up the figure or scene into larger, sometimes very large works.

ALEX KATZ: I paint with the idea that there's an audience out there, and I'm going to tell them what things look like, and I'm going to tell them what a painting should be.

JEFFREY BROWN: He'd come of artistic age when abstract expressionism ruled.

Think Jackson Pollock.

Katz was determined to go his own way.

You did something different.

Why?

ALEX KATZ: Something deep inside tells me not to go with the other guys.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not to go with the other guys.

ALEX KATZ: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do your own thing.

ALEX KATZ: I think Jackson Pollock might be the best American painter ever.

And I ain't like Jackson Pollock at all, you know?

And so I will try something else.

Don't be afraid.

You should never be afraid of your instincts.

JEFFREY BROWN: It took a while for others to come along, the figures, the flatness of the paint on the canvas, the clear, crisp lines, everything the art world at the time was not, all of it now on display in a permanent wing at Colby dedicated to Katz's art.

Curator Kiko Aebi: KIKO AEBI, Curator, Colby Museum: He chose in a very sort of defiant way to depict people and landscape.

And I think it was very much because he has this contrarian streak.

He likes to do what other people are not doing because people tell him he's not supposed to do it.

JEFFREY BROWN: And the seeming simplicity of the technique, it's actually highly refined, worked and reworked, paring to essentials.

KIKO AEBI: It's very hard to look easy, like, when you look at the world, and it doesn't look like flat planes.

So to be able to create a composition from flat planes, I think, is really a challenge, but it also is a sort of distillation of the world in this really evocative way.

He's able to reduce a whole landscape sometimes to two colors.

And you can read.

It's legible.

You know what he's depicting, and that's magic.

JEFFREY BROWN: Gallery shows, museum exhibitions, and high honors would all come, including a National Medal of Arts from President Biden in 2023.

On a "News Hour" visit in 2015, at age 88, Katz was still climbing up ladders and painting every day.

ALEX KATZ: I like doing it.

Never know what's going to happen when you start on the Canvas.

I love the adventure.

And I love sticking it to people who didn't think I was anything for so many years.

JEFFREY BROWN: These days, the images are dramatically pared down.

He showed us sketches and paintings based on a beach scene he recalls from a job he had as a teenager.

ALEX KATZ: They stayed in the back of my head for 50, 60, 70, 80 years, you know?

JEFFREY BROWN: It's very sparse, right?

ALEX KATZ: Nothing's there.

JEFFREY BROWN: Nothing's there.

(LAUGHTER) ALEX KATZ: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: These are not what most people would think of as an Alex Katz painting.

ALEX KATZ: No.

That's not my problem.

(LAUGHTER) JEFFREY BROWN: One touchstone for Katz has been the artist Henri Matisse.

It pops up in works as early as this 1956 watercolor.

And now he will be paired with the French master at the Matisse Museum in Nice.

Katz grew emotional speaking of it.

ALEX KATZ: I'm going to have a two-man show with Matisse, right?

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

ALEX KATZ: Well, Matisse is like, in 400 years of European-American painting, he's the best technical painter, period.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

ALEX KATZ: I will put my paintings up there and see if they're any good.

(LAUGHTER) JEFFREY BROWN: Meanwhile, art and nature continue to interact on the coast of Maine.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown.