Double Image

I have been an admirer of  Frankie Brackley Tolman for many years.  

Her works as a visual artist are in response to the ever-changing beauty of her surroundings in rural New Hampshire. We share these surroundings. Inspired by her paintings, I decided to undertake a collaborative project, integrating her paintings with music and film.  

Since it’s inception in 2017, this collaboration has evolved into a final work which follows the musical form of a sonata. In Sonata in G, the four movements take their titles from those of the paintings: “botanical garden,” “BLUE FLAGS,” “It’s A Jungle Out There,” and “Abundance.”

I began this project in the spring of 2017 by filming one of Frankie’s paintings, “Gardening in the Rain."  I was attracted to this work because of it’s large splashes of color, which jumped out of the canvas. This effect was created by the large amount of open canvas, free space surrounding the flowers, and splashes of vivid colors–especially yellow. This imagery led me to film the field in front of our home, bursting with the perennial springtime daffodils naturalized throughout the landscape.  

I began experimenting with these two different videos. 

Merging the clips from Frankie’s canvas with those of the daffodils–two-dimensional inanimate object with three dimensional live flowers–some exciting possiblities came into focus.

As I continued to experiment with various video editing techniques, Frankie and I drafted ideas of proposals for this collaborative project.  

We adopted our team title, Double Image. This reflected the effect observed when her painting was merged with the daffodils in a short film. It also was a statement of shared connections, personally and through our art.