Editor’s note: In November, David Yezzi of The New Criterion interviewed the painter Graham Nickson at his studio in SoHo in Manhattan.

DAVID YEZZI: You were born in Lancashire, England?

GRAHAM NICKSON: Yes, in an area called the Forest of Bowland. It’s very romantic in the sense that you have rolling hills and very rugged moorlands, medieval dry-stone walls, and lush valleys, with sheep on the hills and cattle in the valleys.

DY: So your connection to landscape goes way back.

GN: I grew up on a farm, although my father was a painter. This is the ironic thing: my connection with American painting runs very deep because my father’s favorite painter was John Singer Sargent. He was very impressed by the dexterity and flashiness of Sargent.

My brother, on the other hand, who was also a painter, went to the Slade School of Fine Art. He was one of the first people in the UK to make discoveries based on the work of certain New York School Abstract Expressionists. He was painting à la de Kooning and Pollock. So I grew up with these de Kooning-esque paintings on the wall.

DY: You’ve lived in the United States since the 1970s. Do you see yourself more as a British painter or an American painter?

GN: Well, to be humorous about it to a certain degree, I think of myself as a New York