“Do you mind?” LeRoy Neiman asks as he leans forward in his painting studio and reaches for a great-smelling cigar.

“Is it a Macanudo?” he says, peering down at the label and exhaling a fine stream of smoke. “Then it’s a gift, it’s not mine. I like the real Cuban cigars.”

Now he was smoking and telling stories. Or rather, backstories: the narratives to the scenes he created in his brilliantly colored paintings of athletes and sporting events.

Mr. Neiman, one of America’s best-known artists, turned 90 on June 8, and he still paints and draws daily in the same bright, bold style, and in the spacious studio in his longtime Central Park West apartment.

He recently completed a commissioned painting for the 2012 Ryder Cup golf tournament and plans to travel to Medinah, Ill., in September 2012 to attend the match.

Going to sporting events, always sitting in front rows, helped make Mr. Neiman as familiar a sight as his paintings. And he still has his trademark Dalí-esque mustache and a full head of hair neatly brushed back. But because he has trouble walking, he is largely unable to attend live sporting events anymore, and he misses it.

“Very much,” he said the other day in his studio, which overlooks Central Park. He was dressed in a pink Oxford shirt and white linen pants and pink socks and gray bucks.

He was surrounded by a vast array of paints and brushes, and while he spoke, he rocked his wheelchair back and forth on the paint-splattered floor.

His trademark style was evident on the huge canvas of jazz greats on the wall, and on the painting clamped to his easel, of Frank Sinatra at the bar at Rao’s with the bartender, Nick the Vest, mixing a drink.

Mr. Neiman is finishing up his autobiography, which he promises is chock full of his personal encounters with athletes, and their reactions to him.

“I think it was a discovery for them to see a live artist and to see this character hanging around before ballgames or in dressing rooms or at a fight, that close — my whole thing was to draw close,” he said. “If you get close to the game, there are a lot of things that go on.”

For example, there was the boxing match when Bobo Olson, a middleweight, was punched so hard by Sugar Ray Robinson that he went cross-eyed, said Mr. Neiman, who was sitting next to Mr. Olson’s corner during that fight.

“He was hit so hard that his eyes were crossed,” he said. “Even after being revived in the dressing room, his eyes stayed that way. These are the discoveries you make.”

He recalled being close enough to the fights of Emile Griffith to notice that the boxer’s good luck charms were the silk robes handmade by his mother, a different color every fight.

Whatever the event, it was important to be ringside, he said. Even the time he painted Leonard Bernstein athletically conducting an orchestra.