Reva

Reva Freedman (née Rolston), [1919-2011] child prodigy violinist, and graduate of The Royal Conservatory of Music, was a member of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. A self-taught visual artist, she began painting in her 40's after participating in a Miami poolside art class, a seemingly solitary event, that would forever alter the course of her life. Painting would become Reva's full time passion.

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“I paint every night, all night”. Reva was fascinated by how many different ways she could paint the same thing. She began with landscapes, moved on to pop art, and from there to abstract expressionism, inspired by the work of Chagall, Picasso, Miro, De Kooning, Debuffet, Pollack and the playfulness of Red Grooms.

 

Gary Monroe, respected photographer, lecturer, writer, archivist and early admirer of the nascent Outsider scene in the late 70’s, became an early enthusiast of Reva’s work when visiting her in the late 80’s and included her in his seminal book, Extraordinary Interpretations: Florida Self-Taught Artists. “To me, Reva Freedman was in a class all her own. Her paintings are in the top tier of self-taught art. She worked in a mysterious realm between consciousness and materialism. Reva was given fully to her labor, and it is as if her paintings are her DNA. She created because she had to.”

 

Reva made herself known by being prolific and experimental. She believed that anything could be art, mixing media, and even re-purposing found objects. She created a sequence of painted Styrofoam sculptures, and hand painted T-shirts, selling them to New York art galleries and Coconut Grove boutiques.
 

Reva’s work, singular in its strength and aesthetic, is characterized by enigmatic colorful figures striving to tell stories about family, creativity, life and illusions. Later collages integrate mixed media layers upon these figures, creating compositions as complex as they are large in scale. A brief series of black and white works followed, coinciding with a difficult period of her life.

Once, about becoming a painter, Reva commented, “whatever I attempted seemed to have a life of its own... barns became mountains... roads turned into rivers and back again... amazing what a little paint could do. I felt like God. Who else could have moved scenery around like that?” 

Reva Freedman passed away in 2011, but not before realizing her central aspiration. Her paintings hung in six Norton Museum of Art Hortt exhibitions. Many of Reva’s works have been aquired by notable collectors.