It’s a weekday afternoon and David Freed’s printmaking studio on South Laurel Street in Richmond occupies that cozy space between productive chaos and order. He’s a few weeks past his 90th birthday and the opening of his most recent exhibition, and that means it’s time to tidy up and get back to work.

“My grandson comes over here and we work on [the mess],” he says, maneuvering around a kitchen-table-sized etching press and gesturing to the stacks of paper and roller carts strewn with pastels, brushes and solvents.

The former printing shop that houses his studio is just a 10-minute walk from Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts, where Freed founded the printmaking program in 1966 and taught for nearly four decades before retiring as a professor emeritus in 2005. In the picture window by his desk, two vases of desiccated wildflowers arch against the backdrop of a verdant yard. Nearby, a pair of hazy green landscapes-in-progress hang on a thumbtack-pricked wall.

It’s landscapes like these that make up “Puzzles,” Freed’s show at the Reynolds Gallery on West Main Street, which runs from May 15 to July 24. There, a single self-portrait joins more than a dozen collage-like works on paper that Freed produced over the last three years using the printmaking technique of etching, watercolor and mixed media. Bearing titles like “Floodstage,” “Force” and “Now November,” they scan weather and seasons with a dreamlike, atmospheric lens that seems to suddenly snap into focus: A cluster of tree branches. A silhouetted figure. The hooked arm of a river swimmer.

‘If you’re around me very much, you’re going to get your portrait done’

Freed’s landscapes are captivating and quietly powerful — but they’re not what’s on his mind this afternoon. Instead, he hovers over his desk, flipping through a paperback book of portraits and telling anecdotes about the people inside. Freed self-published the book, “The School of Push and Pull: Art People – VCU,” in 2015, only printing about 25 copies to give away. It was his way of memorializing his friends and colleagues at VCUarts.

“That’s [VCUarts founder] Theresa Pollak … she was really something,” he narrates, pointing out figures who loom large in the arts world, locally and beyond. “That’s [lithographer] Barbara Tisserat, who was my closest colleague … George Nan, who started the photography department …. Then I get into the students.”

“Artists make art about what they’re interested in,” he’ll later say, referring to both the landscapes and the people. “I always say if you’re around me very much, you’re going to get your portrait done.”

In Freed’s lifetime, there’s been no shortage of things and people to be interested in. His prolific career began in his birthplace of Toledo, Ohio, with supportive parents and teachers who encouraged his artmaking. At Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, he studied printmaking techniques in preparation for work as a commercial artist, but a stint illustrating car parts for catalogs made him reconsider that path.

In 1959, he was accepted to graduate school at the University of Iowa, where he studied under the famed printmaker Mauricio Lasansky, lived next door to and befriended future U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Wright, and married his wife, Mary Freed.

In 1963, Freed was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Grant to attend the Royal College of Art in London. He and Mary arrived by boat at the height of the Beatles craze and the British pop art movement, the latter of which influenced Freed’s art to respond to contemporary social issues.

He’d go on to produce prints that sold to major art museums, galleries and collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, to name just a few.  

Putting down roots in Richmond – and at VCU

Over subsequent decades, Freed would exhibit broadly, both domestically and internationally. He’d also return to England to teach, work and exhibit many times, maintaining friendships there to this day. But it was Richmond — a city that reminded him of London — where he chose to put down permanent roots and raise his two sons.

In 1966, he accepted an offer to start a printmaking program at what was then Richmond Professional Institute (later VCU), settling into the life of a working, teaching artist.

“I came [to VCU] and I never, never regretted it,” he says. “The students! If you’re going to be a teacher, two things: You gotta love what you teach, and you gotta love the students. I just really like the students.”

In 2001, The Anderson Gallery at VCUarts held a major retrospective of Freed’s work and published a catalog that included statements from former students, demonstrating that the feeling was mutual. Together they paint a picture of “a family man,” “an exceptional teacher, mentor, and friend,” and “a true original” who is “generous with humor” and whose “passion for art is truly awe-inspiring.”

Freed’s poet friend Wright — with whom he collaborated on an illustrated book of poems and is still in contact today — also contributed a passage for the catalog, writing:

“There is a kind of mordant wit that informs all of Dave’s work, a scintillation that often goes, and shouldn’t, unnoticed. He is, by now, his own school, an artist who sees with all three eyes, the guy who walks by himself along the banks of the black river.”

Freed retired from teaching four years later at the age of 69, but a number of his students continue to write, visit and “ask me for advice, which I can’t give them,” he says.

‘A very, very lucky life’

In 2014, Freed experienced the loss of a dear friend and collaborator: his longtime art dealer Beverly Reynolds, who founded the Reynolds Gallery and was a prominent supporter of the arts in Richmond. Some years prior, Freed had done her portrait, and her husband, David Reynolds, had purchased it as a gift for his wife.

Following Beverly’s death from cancer, when David was living with Parkinson’s disease at the senior care community Westminster Canterbury before his own passing in 2023, Freed says, “Everyone told me, you know, David took that picture of Beverly with him to Canterbury, and he can see it from his bed. It was the most moving compliment I have ever had in my life.”

Beverly’s daughter Alice Livingston now operates the Reynolds Gallery with co-director Julia Monroe. The opening celebration for “Puzzles” and Freed’s 90th birthday was, Livingston attests, “a full house,” with many friends, family and former students in attendance.

“David lives in the Fan, and his studio is in Oregon Hill, so he often stops by the gallery on his walks to and from the studio,” Livingston says. “Julia and I always look forward to his visits — not only for the chance to catch up, but also to hear his wonderful stories about the early days at VCU, his travels and studies in London for the Fulbright, and the deep friendships he has made over the years.”

Back in Freed’s studio, the rain is coming down hard and the scene through the picture window has begun to resemble some of his landscapes: shimmery and full of movement. He has moved from the desk to the wall, which is covered in decades of memorabilia: photos of his grandsons, father and sister, postcards and etchings sent to him from former students, a drawing by his grandniece as a child.

He describes his theme as one of gratitude: for the opportunities and experiences he’s had, for his sons and their sons who live nearby or will soon, for the moral support of his late parents and his wife, and for all his students who became friends — a windfall he never expected when he started teaching.

“I’m very lucky,” he says. “I’ve had a very, very lucky life.”

It hasn’t all been easy.

Amidst the photographs on the wall are two portraits Freed drew of himself and Mary around 2015, shortly after recovering from a bad fall. It was winter, and he was walking down Broad Street when he encountered a patch of ice.

“I took a leap across that hunk of ice and didn’t make it, and I broke my neck,” Freed recalls. “That changed my life. I was in the hospital, surgeries, rehab. I was paralyzed for quite a while.”

For a time, Freed, who is right-handed, could only move his left hand. Mary brought him a sketchbook from his studio, and he would practice drawing his right hand with his left. Gradually, he was able to switch hands. Eventually, he could walk with a cane.

After the injury, he says, “I got back to doing work. I had to. I don’t want to sound romantic about this, but this stuff is compulsive. It gets in your system, and you just have to do it.

“Visual artists continue on, you know. Matisse on his deathbed was still making art. Picasso was. You just don’t stop.”

This article was originally published on the School of the Arts website.