When Reva Freedman said, “I don’t paint for fun, I paint for real,” she likely meant that the process of painting engendered an intuitive “dialog” which guided her mark making, not a “thinking thing.” Thought would have inhibited her freewheeling visual associations. Like call-and-response field hollers, her paintings defined themselves through a give-and-take process. As she brushed and sponged florescent colors across large sheets of paper, her labor found cohesive and resonant forms: “Smear it a little here, I smear it a little there.”
Freedman was surrounded by a thousand of her paintings. Many were rolled-up and stored in closets, ready to cascade down whenever a door is opened. They were scattered throughout apartment, where other senior citizens played golf and lounged by the pool and gossiped at social luncheons. “I had a very exciting life through painting,” she concluded.