When Jonathan Silver, who ran Salts Mill, the museum of my work at Saltaire near Bradford, got really ill, I came over from L.A. simply because I could see he was dying. He was a close friend. Before Jonathan’s illness we had talked every couple of days on the telephone about art and all manner of things. That was in 1997, and it was the first time I’d stayed in England for a few months since the 1970s. Jonathan lived in Wetherby, which is a very pleasant drive from Bridlington, via York. I was going there every couple of days to visit him, and I started noticing the countryside and how it changed. Because it’s agricultural land around here, the surface of the earth itself is constantly being altered. The wheat grows, then it’s harvested, then you see it ploughed.

In a sense those Yorkshire paintings came out of the ideas of the great spaces of the West, but it did occur to me straightway that Yorkshire is one place where you have enormous vistas ... you can see everything as you drive, from Bridlington to Wetherby, just east of York, down Garrowby Hill and up it again, and I realized here’s a subject and here’s a way to paint it. Jonathan was urging me all the while to "paint Yorkshire." I had never stayed this long in Yorkshire. I was forced to see it afresh.

I’d painted Saltaire, for Jonathan; I wanted him to see it as I see it now, and also for him to know how I’d remembered it as well. Salts Mill is about time and the history of the place, and many places like it. By that I mean, for instance, the rows of houses to the right of the Mill never came down the hill like that. You would actually have to be inside the Mill looking out to achieve that perspective effect. But I grew up in Bradford in small terraces jammed together just like that, and I remember Saltaire as a busy working mill—literally the hub of the whole community.