CONVERSATIONS
Geff Strik
Visual Artist in Residence, The Florida Orchestra
BY MARCIA BIGGS In an ambitious new season from Beethoven to the Beatles, the Florida Orchestra (TFO) brings back French painter Geff Strik to produce an art film featuring his dramatic interpretations to accompany Strauss’ Don Quixote set for October 11-13. With Michael Francis conducting and guest musician Maximilian Hornung on violoncello, the performance does not get top billing on the program – Beethoven’s Eroica does - but may very well be the star of the evening. Earlier this year, TFO commissioned the St. Petebased artist to create paintings for a 29-minute video to be viewed above the stage during a Masterworks performance of Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”). Actually, the concept had been born months earlier over conversations in a local Kahwa coffee shop. Strik gives credit to Ella Frederickson, head librarian for the Florida Orchestra, for the concept and much of the research and legwork in bringing both collaborations to reality. “Ella actually had the idea three years ago, but it never went anywhere,” says Strik. Enter new Florida Orchestra CEO Mark Cantrell, who was behind the idea 100 percent. “He thought it would be a new way to engage the audience.” With music director Michael Francis fully on board, Strik set to work creating a series of 18 10-x-5-foot canvases inspired by Verklarte Nacht, which is set to a controversial 1896 poem of romance and tragedy. Each finished painting was photographed, with additional footage of painting and dreamy transitions linking the images in tandem with the music and poem. In late March, Verklarte Nacht and Geff Strik received a standing ovation at three orchestra performances.
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expressionist,” he calls himself. His works are large and complex, filled with passion, darkness and dreams, history, religion, Dali and Picasso, and American pop icons like Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys. Now just two months out from the October TFO concert, Strik is in the process of creating 29 small studies for Don Quixote. They hang on the wall in his living room, where he can study them. Strik is free to take artistic license, creating vivid scenes from his imagination for the characters and storyline. He is, after all, an artist. “I set a mood,” he says. “I like romanticism, and truth, and what is bigger than us, fate. I tweak the story and make it mine.” The entire process started when he obtained the score from Michael Francis. With this he created a storyboard, with 29 sketches of scenes featuring Don Quixote. These become small studies, and then 10-x-5-foot canvases, then photographed and transitioned into a 47-minute video synchronized precisely to the live symphonic performance. “I know exactly how it will be, down to the second,” says Strik, as he glances over his storyboards.
“As far as we know, this was the first collaboration of its kind,” says Strik, who was raised in the south of France and moved to St. Pete in 2004 after a short stint in New York.
Strik has high ambitions, he talks of going global with the symphonic art films, and working on another piece for next season with Florida Orchestra.
Strik seems perfect for the job of painting symphonic masterpieces. Intense, passionate, a French “romantic
“My work is progressing, getting better,” says the artist with piercing eyes. “If there is no passion, I don’t want to paint.”
StPeteLifeMag.com
September/October 2019
