This discussion took place on a bright summer morning in late June 2015, at the studio of Juan Navarro Baldeweg in Madrid. It was a conversation between two friends who have known one another for over forty years and whose shared interests span the worlds of art, architecture, and ideas. As they talked, they moved from room to room among paintings in process...

Juan Navarro Baldeweg (JNB): The way you write is very fluent and easy for the reader.

William J. Curtis (WJC): There is a wonderful passage in one of the essays of George Orwell where he talks about being a writer and says “Good prose is like a window pane, transparent.” You don’t know that you are reading, you go straight to the sense. There is no interference. In the catalogue of my exhibition in the Alhambra, ‘Abstraction and Light,’ I have this condensed poem, ‘Mental Landscapes,’ which defines my reaction to nature, to light, and to the revelation of things (...)