Florence Wint scoffs at the stereotype of spending her golden years relaxing.  “I never liked partying or spending money,” she said. “Just let me do my art. That’s all I want.”  Who needs vacations or book groups, she said on Wednesday, while working away at her latest abstract collage — one of dozens of recently completed pieces that surrounded her in her basement apartment in Forest Hills, Queens.  Ms. Wint’s goal, beginning in childhood, was to become a recognized artist: to show in Manhattan, to sell her work, to have a gallery. Those dreams were derailed long ago by her duties as a wife and mother.  Now this widow with waning strength has resumed the quest, and is more productive and ambitious than ever, working all day, every day.  “I was always driven,” she said. “I can’t sleep if I don’t do my artwork.”  For evidence of this obsession, let us now enter a four-bedroom house in Maplewood, N.J., where Ms. Wint, 85, lived for the past 30 years.  Even after months of neatening by her son Ted Wint, the house is still so crowded with prints, canvases and sculptures that one can move through it only in narrow walkways.  “The art just took over the house,” she said while visiting on Tuesday.  Because of the clutter, Ms. Wint stopped letting friends in and discouraged visits from relatives in recent years. Her grandsons’ bunk beds became storage units, and the kitchen became her studio, leaving her no room to cook.  “She was so fixated on getting into New York galleries, she wasn’t eating,” said Mr. Wint, who in August took his mother to the hospital to be treated for pneumonia and a heart valve problem.  During her two months there, she blanketed Manhattan galleries by mail with photographs of her work. Two of them wound up accepting some pieces, as did a New Jersey medical center run by the Summit Medical Group. She has sold several pieces.  In October, after her hospital stay, Ms. Wint agreed to move into her son’s home in Queens. He offered a bed, kitchen access and a space to make art, and he arranged to have the house full of art appraised.  Growing up in Newark, young Florence was a natural at drawing. She painted signs and other items in her father’s hardware store and went on to study at the city’s Arts High School, then at New York University, and then at Columbia, Pratt and the Art Students League.  In the 1950s, she lived in a loft on East 10th Street under Willem de Kooning’s studio and envied his circle of artist friends who spent days creating and nights at the Cedar Tavern.  But she was a nondrinker who had to teach art to afford materials and studio time with masters like Robert Blackburn.  At age 28, Ms. Wint married a Jamaican immigrant who was widowed with four young children in Flatbush. Her family opposed the biracial marriage and disowned her, she said.  Running the household and raising Ted and his four siblings, she worked on her art late at night in the basement, often using discarded items and old house paint. When relocating to Maplewood, around 1980, she put some paintings out in the trash and they were snapped up by passers-by.  “I was shocked that people would want them,” she said. “I realized I should be showing my work.”  In New Jersey, Ms. Wint did some teaching and studying in art workshops and entered her work in various exhibitions. She also illustrated a 1993 children’s book, “Cowboy Ed.”  But her abstract expressionism “didn’t fit in” with the local art scene, she said, and for 15 years, she was occupied by having to care for her husband, also named Ted, who was battling Alzheimer’s disease and blindness.  He died 13 years ago, she said, “and then my artwork took over and I didn’t want to be bothered.”  On Tuesday, she surveyed the sea of work in the Maplewood house: expressive oil paintings of nudes, watercolors of flowers, bold woodcuts and clay sculptures of fantastical scenes.  Even the bathrooms were used for storage. There were canvases stacked everywhere, and cabinets full of prints.  “It’s just a giant repository of work — it’s like a fantasy world just walking through the house,” said Howard Carroll, an appraiser for the Swain Galleries in Plainfield, N.J., whom Mr. Wint hired.  With “a few thousand” pieces in the house, Mr. Carroll said it was the biggest collection by a single artist that he had evaluated.  Ms. Wint said that this was precisely what prodded her to keep racing against time for her goal, even with deteriorating eyesight.  “If I go blind, I’ll work with clay,” she said. “The thing is, I don’t give up.”  Telling Detail “She’s no amateur housewife painter,” an appraiser said of Ms. Wint. “Her style is very confident and quite good, but she never had the contacts to promote her into the prominent galleries.”  A version of this article appears in print on February 16, 2014, on page MB4 of the New York edition with the headline: Creative Exuberance. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
Once Florence Wint was relieved of her homemaking and caretaking duties, she plunged back into creating the art she had wanted to make for decades.