LUNCH WITH AGNES.(Agnes Martin)

Agnes Martin, the Saskatchewan-born Abstract Expressionist painter--a contemporary of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Barnett Newman--whose tranquil paintings are in the Whitney, the Guggenheim, moma, and other museums, abandoned New York a good three decades ago to live spartanly and to work, somewhat reclusively, in New Mexico. Now residing in Taos at the age of ninety-one, she was due the other day to be called on at the small bungalow she lives in near the big Taos Mountain, by her friend and neighbor Tony Huston, in his white pickup truck. He is a master falconer and a screenwriter (of, among other movies, a film of James Joyce's "The Dead" made by his father, John Huston).

"Every now and then, I get to have lunch with Agnes," Huston said. "There's such solidity in her presence. She's not wobbly. She occupies all the space given to her. In 1997, she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. The next year, President Clinton gave her the National Medal of Arts. Her paintings sell for millions, her dealer says. She spends a lot of time just sitting, painting in her head.

"She finds serenity and power in the Taos Mountain, as so many of us here do," he went on, driving bossily over a sun-blinding, narrow dirt road leading to Martin's home. "Either the mountain likes you or it doesn't, and I'm sure the mountain likes Agnes."

He turned off the dirt road into a circular enclave called Plaza de Retiro. A spotless white E320 Mercedes was parked in front of her place. "Her car's here," he said. He knocked on the door and peered into the window. "But she's not home. She probably got a ride to her studio."

Not long after, he found her, in her studio, in a three-hundred-year-old adobe cottage half a mile away. The studio has white walls, a skylight, and a small window with shutters, and inside it was arranged simply: a work table with paintbrushes and three rulers; a couple of chairs. Hanging on a wall was a painting in progress--a five-by-five-foot white canvas with one blue stripe at the top.

Agnes Martin has a full, strong, sun-browned face that looks as if it belonged on Mt. Rushmore. She has gray hair, cut straight with bangs, in what used to be called a Buster Brown style, and she is muscular and full-bodied, with large, strong, thick-fingered hands. She was wearing black sneakers, bluejeans, and a blue tunic of thick Guatemalan cloth, with four engraved silver buttons going down from the neckline. "The silver buttons come from Tony Reyna's shop on the Pueblo reservation--no tax," she said. "I want to get more of these silver buttons.

"Tomorrow, I'll drive myself over here," she said. "I have twenty-twenty vision. A policeman just gave me the driver's test. He said I was a good driver."