Vertical Portraits: Collin van der Sluijs
When Maastricht, Netherlands’ Bonnefanten Museum approached Collin van der Sluijs to participate in October’s kids-focused installment of its Free Fridays series, the painter and muralist suggested keeping things simple.
The Bonnefanten had other ideas.
“I volunteered to do a watercolor painting workshop, but [the Bonnefanten team] said ‘We want you to paint a wall,’” explains Collin, the Maastricht local who’s one of 13 artists exhibiting with Vertical Gallery at this year’s Aqua Art Miami. “I said ‘Well, I have to get acrylics and brushes. How many kids can I expect — about 60 or 70?’ And they said ‘Last time, it was close to 900, and this time, we expect more.’ Riding my bike back home, I thought ‘What did I get myself into?’”
In fact, roughly 3,000 visitors turned out for the Free Fridays event, which coincided with the launch of the Kinderkunstuitleen, a new children’s library allowing Bonnefanten patrons between the ages of four and 12 to borrow works of art (including some of Collin’s) to hang at home. “It opened at 5:00 p.m., and within five minutes, there were 25 kids — and then it doubled. One family waited more than an hour in line,” Collin says. “It was hectic, man. I was totally dead when I finished.”
Collin’s professional relationship with the rocket-shaped Bonnefanten stretches back to 2006, when he was commissioned to paint all the pillars on the building’s ground floor. He’s also a regular visitor to the museum, which showcases historic, modern and contemporary works from across the globe.
Collin painted his contributions to the Free Fridays mural in the hours before the Bonnefanten opened to the public. His subject: the grey heron, the long-legged wading bird commonly sighted on museum grounds thanks to the neighboring Maas, the 575-mile-long river that gives Maastricht its name. “I’ve painted many herons before,” he says. “I didn’t want to make it too hard on myself.”
Collin brought with him 80 acrylic markers to distribute among the Free Fridays attendees. “You can’t have that many kids working with brushes and buckets of water, because too much stuff drops on the floor,” he says. “We did it like a theme park — five kids in and five kids out, every few minutes. The biggest fear was that some kid might take one of the markers into the museum and draw mustaches on all the portraits, so we placed a big cardboard box near the exit, and when the kids were done, they put the caps back on and dropped everything in, so the next five could come in. That went on for four hours straight.”
Collin imposed few restrictions on his young collaborators — a fitting modus operandi for an artist whose work emerges spontaneously, from the deepest reaches of his subconscious.
“They asked me ‘What do we have to draw?’ and I said ‘Whatever you want to draw.’ I wasn’t going to tell them ‘You have to paint around the heron,’” Collin says. “After 30 minutes, it was completely out of my hands, and by the time we were done, the heron had a mustache, and there was shit written all over its beak. The tallest kid wrote ‘I really like fish’ at the very top, with an arrow pointing down to the heron. One even added the 6-7 meme from TikTok. Whatever they wanted to do, they did. Some of the kids blacked out the heron’s eye, though, and when they went away, I fixed it. I really wanted to keep the eye — it’s the only thing on the wall that looks at you. You need that visual connection.”
Don’t go looking for the heron the next time you visit the Bonnefanten, however. The mural was painted on a temporary wall, and painted over less than 72 hours later. But the memories are permanent.
“By the time I got home, I had 30 or 40 Instagram messages from people thanking me,” Collin says. “I had a big smile on my face. What a day.”
Vertical Gallery will feature 12 new works on paper from Collin van der Sluijs (@collinvandersluijs) at Aqua Art Miami, which runs December 3-7. Email sales@verticalgallery.com for the collector preview.
