Masters DUTCH
Jaap Sinke and Ferry van Tongeren in their Haarlem studio.
DARWIN, SINKE & VAN TONGEREN IS AN ABSOLUTE WUNDERKAMMER OF THE NATURAL AND MANMADE, DENSE WITH BONES, PAINT AND PLUMAGE, ALONG WITH AN ABUNDANCE OF ANTIQUES AND FASCINATING EPHEMERA. A DELIGHTFUL, DAZZLING BESTIARY OF ANIMAL COMPOSITIONS THAT ARE MESMERIZING AND GLORIOUS.
A blue and gold macaw looms over the head of a scarlet ibis, framed on the right by a crocodile spine.
DESCRIBING THE WORK OF THE DUTCH ARTISTS JAAP SINKE AND FERRY VAN TONGEREN AS “TAXIDERMY” IS LIKE CALLING THE WORK OF REVOLUTIONARY DANISH CHEF RENÉ REDZEPI “COOKING.” YES, PLENTY OF SCIENCE AND PRECISION IS INVOLVED, BUT IMAGINATION AND ARTISTRY IS WHAT ELEVATES “SKIN ART,” AS THEY PRACTICE IT, TO A SINGULAR AND TRANSCENDENT PLANE. FOR SINKE AND VAN TONGEREN, TAXIDERMY IS SCIENCE IN SERVICE OF ART, WHICH IS IN TURN A MEANS, AS ART ALWAYS IS, TO COMMUNICATE. WHAT REMAINS A PASSION HAS BECOME THE ARTISTS’ MISSION: TO AWAKEN THE WORLD, VIA ARRESTING DISPLAYS OF PLUMAGE, SKIN, BONE AND ANIMAL ENERGY, TO THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SPECIES. THEIR DREAM IS TO CREATE A MUSEUM OF FINE TAXIDERMY, A MONUMENTAL COLLECTION OF ENDANGERED AND EXTINCT ANIMALS NOT JUST PRESERVED FOR POSTERITY BUT CELEBRATED—NATURE’S ARTISTRY MEETING THEIR OWN. WHAT A FINE AND REMARKABLE LEGACY THAT WOULD BE.
DUTCH MASTERS
IN CONVERSATION WITH THE URBAN ELECTRIC CO.
UECO: It strikes us that the two of you are yourselves the rarest of species, creatives whose undying curiosity led you into a whole new mysterious world. How did the shift to taxidermy come about?
VAN TONGEREN: Jaap and I have a shared background in advertising. We have worked together for two decades, first at Ogilvy & Mather where we met, then ultimately at an agency I founded where Jaap became a partner. When I tired of the business and sold it to open a door to a new adventure, I knew it would involve Jaap. Our creative minds share a brain and our skills are complementary. Taxidermy was an unexpected direction, however. While I’ve always been interested in animals, it wasn’t until spending a year traveling with my family after selling my agency that I noticed and became fascinated by so many dead animals along the side of the road. You could say this whole venture was inspired by roadkill.
SINKE: It’s a bit ironic since I grew up on a farm with a father who was a veterinarian. He wasn’t dealing with domesticated pets, so I was exposed to all kinds of raw, bloody animal doings. But that animal awareness, of how they behave and move, is probably in me from then. And in art school I spent a year learning to draw anatomically correct animals.
VAN TONGEREN: Jaap really plays with the animal poses for our pieces. He manipulates a multi-jointed flexible armature used in stop motion work, something he was familiar with from our advertising days. And he sketches all kinds of possible poses. We never use the same pose twice.
SINKE: I also look at videos of animals to see how they move and figure out positions. YouTube is our greatest continuing ed resource. Taxidermy involves more skills than we could have imagined. Both of us are dexterous, but there were so many things we had never done before that we had to learn— welding, carpentry, mixing chemicals,
skinning, tanning—in addition to educating ourselves about the animals themselves.
UECO: The start-to-finish process, from procuring animals to creating an amazing tableau, is so laborious and involved. How do you divide up the tasks?
SINKE: We both are involved in bringing the animals to the studio. A zoo or a breeder notifies us that an animal has died and we hop in the jeep and drive to pick it up as soon as possible, before the skin has a chance to dry out. It’s like being on call; we have to drop everything at a moment’s notice. The real hurdle is the paperwork because there are so many regulations involving dead animals. In some countries, you can’t transport a dead animal, so we have to skin it on site. In those cases, we come home with literally skin and bones.
VAN TONGEREN: We only ever buy animals that have been raised in captivity. Animals in the wild suffer all kinds of injuries that make them poor candidates for taxidermy. And we have no interest in being taxidermists to trophy hunters. Zoos are critical to our work. The animals from zoos all have their own passport-like documents stating they were born in captivity and then they're free to trade. Also, zoos have breeding programs for really rare animals that are on the edge of extinction. Zoos continue to present challenges though, especially in the Netherlands, because they are still reluctant to sell us animals. They customarily just burn them or bury them. We struggle all the time with turning the tide.
SINKE: So ultimately we end up with a walk-in freezer full of animals. From there they move first to Ferry’s surgery because he is our resident doctor of animal physiognomy.
Major Mitchell’s cockatoo, “caught” mid-dance.
VAN TONGEREN: I’ve always been fascinated by taxidermy, how it was actually done. You know, like how does a ship in a bottle get made? I pestered a local taxidermist to teach me until he relented —after I offered to work for free for a year—and allowed me to apprentice with him. I still work regularly at the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, one of the best and oldest collections of taxidermy in the world.
SINKE: Once Ferry has completed the form the animal is taking and dressed the mannequin with its original coat, a process that is quite complex, I step in to do the finish work that brings the skin of the animal back to life. Tanning turns the skin black so I have to paint it to revive its natural color, everything from the full skin of a reptile to the skin around the eyes of birds to their beaks. I use the same oil paints as the Old Masters.
VAN TONGEREN: Jaap is our resident makeup artist and hairdresser. He adds layer upon layer of color to recreate skin and also handles things like manes and tails. And he fabricates our “label.” We found boxes of old gambling chips made of bone that he
then etches with our initials and those of Charles Darwin, our guiding light whom we made our silent partner.
SINKE: Traditional taxidermy has never really interested us. Professional taxidermists, like those employed by natural history museums, are concerned with scientific accuracy. They employ standard factory molds, often a polyurethane form, to serve as the internal body of the animal. So ultimately the animal is “true” but the rendition is very static. Fashioning an active pose for an animal is much more complicated. The mouth may be open, the wings stretched out, all of which requires a lot more finessing not only of the pose of each animal but of the composition as a whole. We make sketches to play with arrangements and arrive at a final composition, devoting as much time to the entire tableau as to the taxidermy. That comes from our advertising background— we understand the power of storytelling.
In the shadow of a 78-80 million-year-old Hadrosaurus skeleton, Sinke and van Tongeren discuss a composition.
An antique clock case provides the perch for a spotted eagle owl and three ferruginous pygmy owls in Tower of Owls, destined for a client in Mexico.
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devising an overall scheme as well as positioning individual animals such as a green guinea turaco or a western pygmy marmoset.
VAN TONGEREN: So many things come into play: drama, balance, expressiveness, engagement between animals. Just like we don’t want to use standard taxidermy forms, we can’t imagine posing animals on ugly mounts made of plastic. We are always combing antique markets for interesting elements that can serve as platforms or frameworks. For as many animals as we have in the freezer, we have shelves and shelves full of antique glass domes, specimen jars, frames, columns, plinths, cages, vitrines. We make our own bases of marble that we stain with coffee to look old or of wood covered in velvet. Our bias is always to the antique.
UECO: Your studio is such an interesting bridge between the past and the future. Despite the ready access that the internet offers, it seems like art history is the biggest driver of your work, at least as far as composition is concerned.
SINKE: We both went to art school and, being Dutch, we are well aware of the Old Master painters. The Dutch Golden Age was a remarkable period of global exploration, a time when traders returned from voyages with exotic animals never before seen in Europe. The work of painters like Frans Snyders, Jan Weenix and Melchior d’Hondecoeter particularly
intrigued us because they put animals together in a painting that would not necessarily cohabit in nature.
VAN TONGEREN: And the animals are often posed quite dynamically, to the extent of warring with each other, so there’s incredible vitality to the painting. For instance, The Threatened Swan by Jan Asselijn, an iconic painting in Dutch art, just explodes with animal energy. These fantastical compositions are so alive and inspiring, a model for our own work. Ours is an alchemic art—taking dead specimens headed for the incinerator and reimagining them into eternal beauty.
17th-century painter Melchior d’Hondecoeter’s radical gathering of birds and monkeys from far-flung places (Africa, Australia, Central America, Indonesia) in his painting The Menagerie, continues to inspire van Tongeren and Sinke.
Survival, Darwin-style: a bald eagle wrestles with a puff adder and a blood python, left, while a verreaux eagle tackles a royal python and a boa constrictor, right.
Van Tongeren surveys a wild assortment he has finished preparing.
While van Tongeren handles the placement of glass eyes and the arrangement of magnificent plumage, Sinke meticulously recreates the skin around the eye, using the same paints as artists of the Dutch Golden Age.
Strings and pins keep feathers in place as a red and green macaw dries.
Skeleton of a goldenhanded tamarin atop a marble fragment.
Sinke inscribing a bone gambling chip with the DS&vT logo.
Tiger & Toucans II Jaap Sinke
Preserved tulips at the Teylers Museum.
Sinke at the ever-inspiring 18th-century Teylers Museum, around the corner from the DS&vT studio.
A skull of a Mosasaurus hangs in front of a Hadrosaurus being reassembled along a custom-made steel armature. On the back wall hang two DS&vT prints, the top from the Cattle and Concrete Collection, the bottom, a roseate spoonbill from the Unknown Poses Collection.
