Vogue's Dodie Kazanjian recounts an August visit to Alex Katz's bright-yellow house in Lincolnville, Maine, ten minutes from the harbor of Camden, where the 99-year-old painter sat at a round wooden table on the grass, in an orange baseball cap, drinking coffee with his poet son Vincent, daughter-in-law Vivien, their 27-year-old twin sons Isaac and Oliver, their girlfriends, and the family dachshund Eno.

According to Vogue, his wife Ada no longer comes up from the city, but her presence fills the property he bought with artists Lois Dodd and Jean Cohen for $1,200 in a house he says was once a rum store dragged two miles and set on a new foundation that did not fit.

Vogue reports that Katz calls the past couple of years 'the biggest production of my life,' with 150 good-sized paintings, including dark, compressed beach pictures very different from his verdant Maine canvases.

He tells Vogue that this winter he 'didn't care if I ever did another painting' until he was inspired by the Met's large 1919 Monet, Water Lilies. He says his Venice water paintings were seen as illustrations, when for him water has three properties: weight, transparency, and motion.

The magazine characterizes this as a late period, like late de Kooning, with the picture plane emptied of people.

Vogue emphasizes how differently Katz lives than most famous artists: he sleeps in a twin bed in a monastic room, built the kitchen cabinets himself decades ago, and made the entryway's potato-print wallpaper with Lois Dodd.

At 99 he is, per Vogue, wiry and fit, claiming 300 push-ups a day, and still goes to galleries.

He traces his vision to his father Isaac, who died when Alex was 16 and, after seeing teenage watercolors made on a 20-mile bicycle trip, told him to paint his own backyard and 'don't paint details' — what Vogue calls his creation myth.

Vogue notes that Katz's career only found its footing after meeting Ada Del Moro in the fall of 1957; they married in February when he was 30 and she was 29, and he has made more than 1,000 portraits of her over nearly 70 years, including a black-bathing-cap close-up against bright red hanging in the barn studio.

Quoting art historian Irving Sandler, Vogue calls Ada 'woman, wife, mother, muse, model, sociable hostess, myth, icon, and New York goddess.' The story, also carried by NewsBreak, frames Katz as forever reinventing himself, still painting to surprise himself every time.