‘Ilook at this detail in the face, then I look at these curves, and see what I need to see. See the shapes within? I see myself in them.” Ellsworth Kelly says this while standing in front of what he calls “the drawing wall” in his studio, in Spencertown, New York. He holds a Matisse drawing depicting a turbaned man, poignantly tracing the lines of the face and clothes. Looking at the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner nearby, he says, “Perhaps the gesture in the Abstract Expressionists comes out in my flower drawings.” Now into his 89th year, Kelly is a living legend, with two shows of major works opening this summer in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum.

Kelly decamped upstate to Spencertown from New York City in 1970 and was joined by his partner, photographer Jack Shear, in 1984. They moved to their current house, an imposing wood-clad Colonial built circa 1815, in 2005.

Here we see Kelly in his nearby 15,000-square-foot studio, reconfigured and extended by New York architect Richard Gluckman. “I did not want windows, only skylights,” he says. “I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light.” Serried rows of paintbrushes and white, gesso-treated canvases stand alongside strategically placed oxygen tanks: Kelly has recently been placed on permanent treatment for a lung condition possibly caused by breathing in the chemicals associated with painting. He is not allowing the regime to slow him down, continuing to work every day, although he now needs to use a mask while working. This undiminished appetite for work is reflected in his current architectural projects and monumental sculptures, two of his abiding interests. He eschews music in the studio, saying, “I like silence.” Here is an artist in search of the truth in the essential. There is no self-doubt visible in the work, even if there is occasionally in the artist, whose parting words today are “I always think that I can’t do it—my shoulder hurts or I’m tired … but I can.”