Older artists are having a moment. This week, for example, Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton is presenting a major retrospective of nonagenarian German artist Gerhard Richter.

Though Richter stopped painting in 2017, deciding instead to continue drawing, many other artists are still painting throughout their later years. Peter Saul, whose distinctive surrealist works often comment on contemporary politics, is one such artist. The American is one of seven senior painters from around the world profiled in Monocle’s November issue, which is out on Thursday. All of them continue to work, stage major shows and find new success in their eighties and nineties. 

Read on for a special preview of Saul’s profile. And, if you’re in Paris this week, you can find Saul’s work at Gladstone Gallery’s booth A28 during Art Basel Paris. The trippy, technicolour brilliance of the paintings makes them even more unforgettable in person.

“Except for occasionally talking about modern art to college students, I haven’t done anything but paint pictures since 1959,” says Peter Saul. Those pictures are hard to forget. Saul’s subjects bend, distend, wriggle and writhe across the canvas, transforming into colourful, twisted monstrosities along the way.

Those subjects have changed with the times too: the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump. American life – its vividness and its vulgarity – is a loose theme. That and, as Saul puts it, “bad guys”. “I have more freedom to distort, invent motivation or do anything I want to bad guys,” he says. “Whereas with ‘good guys’, the artist is supposed to follow the rules.”

Saul works from preliminary sketches that have a sense of “freshness”, which can be developed as he paints. As he adds his cacophony of colours, he thinks about how to make the painting interesting to the highest number of people. “The picture has to live in the world,” he says. Saul’s work has done just that for a long time but the critical response to it has become far warmer in recent years. While he is appreciative, the change has had little effect on his practice. “Unlike most artists I know, I don’t seem to respond much to encouragement,” he says. “As long as I’ve got the art supplies, I’m going to paint a picture.”

Read the full feature in the November issue of Monocle. Subscribe to Monocle today for unlimited access to all of our journalism.