Dutch design duo Taco Sipma and Mark Moget are the Sauerkids.

This great little ‘pet project’ has been getting lots of attention on the net recently, and with some exhibitions and shows also due in 2007. The Sauerkids project looks set to spread like wild fire baby.

Let’s see what Mark and Taco have to say…

FMCS: Let the boys and girls into some secrets about yourselves? Where do you guys live?

Sauerkids: We live in Rotterdam, which is known for being the ugliest city of the Netherlands. We both have our own graphic design studio.

After work we come together on a regular basis and put on our Sauerkids suits and hats and start drawing like madmen, that kind of stuff. If we’re tired of drawing, we grab our steel guitars, a couple of beers and play some old Hawaiian tunes, you know the usual. We hardly sleep actually.

FMCS: Has Rotterdam got a good creative scene?

Sauerkids: Yes! There are a lot of things going on over here. Art and music festivals, the international film festival, a lot of great art galleries, excellent bands, gigs etc… But nothing too ‘high-brow’.

It’s a balanced mix between underground and mainstream. And Rotterdam is crowded with a bunch of talented illustrators, artists and design agencies. The city does a lot to stimulate upcoming talent initiatives and artists.

FMCS: Tell us a little about Sauerkids and how it all started?

Sauerkids: Sauerkids is a collaboration project between Mark Moget and Taco Sipma (that’s us!). Graphic designers by day, Sauerkids by night.

We met as colleague designers somewhere around 1995, working for a Dutch design agency. We both went our own way eventually, but we always maintained contact and kept sending each other absurd sketches and drawings by email or made music ever now and then.

When the collection of sketches and non-client based work started to grow, the plan arose that maybe a website would be fun as an outlet for all this spare time work. A website mainly for our own amusement. (And maybe for a couple of our friends).

Basically we start things up together. Sketching, making idea’s, etc… As we have the global idea for an illustration, we work separately on our own illustrations. In the mean time we exchange characters, copy elements from each other’s work, and when an illustration approaches it’s final stage we mostly finish it off together.

Besides that our illustration styles are very similar and we’re trying to create a seamless integration of both styles, we like the idea that most people can’t figure out if an illustration is made by Taco or Mark.

FMCS: You guys have an insatiable appetite for making great art, how can we cure this disease before it spreads?

Sauerkids: Thanks a lot (about the great art thing). But I think there’s no cure for us. Too late, it’s kind of compulsive. We can’t help drawing.

To give you a general idea, Mark was about to climb the bell tower with a semi-automatic riffle when his computer broke down recently, luckily the repaired laptop returned just in time.

Life seems harder without drawing, we guess. We often try to take a day off from creating things, but the harder we try to take time off, the faster new ideas pop into our mind, so in the end we wind up being busier than normal.

FMCS: Would you consider yourselves ‘movers and shakers’ or ’shaky movers? (Maybe best to get someone else’s opinion).

Sauerkids: We’re definitely shaky movers! Did you ever see Taco dance? It’s like Elvis who just visited a LSD factory. I don’t think we’re ‘movers and shakers’. We try to keep things as spontaneous as we can, so very little is planned.

We’re still surprised about all the attention and overwhelming reactions we receive…To us Sauerkids means just having a good time, and an opportunity to meet some like-minded people. (And total world domination of course).

FMCS: Are you hoping Saurkids will turn into a fulltime project?

Sauerkids: If you mean whether it’s our goal or not; no, we still see this as our personal pet project, where we can’t be hassled by any clients or critics. And more important: we don’t need to make a living out of it.

How things are going till now is more than we have ever expected (we never expected anything at all, to be honest). We started as a kind off outsiders in the low brow art scene, but since the release of our website, we got to know all kind of nice people and fellow artists and got involved in many great projects.

So we had a more than warm welcome so to speak. Who knows where it’ll end?

FMCS: Let our viewers know what great things they can find down at www.sauerkids.com

Sauerkids: Sugar and spice and anything sour. Or to put it differently; t-shirts, plush, giclee prints, news, music, downloads and soon (very soon) to come our homegrown font library. We’ve tried to create a website which would look like a kind of candy store, filled to the roof, not only an online portfolio but also a website where you might spend some more time than usual.

We are also doing recordings at the moment for a Sauerkids record. But this is in a stage where we actually had agreed to keep it to ourselves… But now that it’s out in the open, we have to follow up on this idea.

FMCS: How do you guys kick back? Sword fights? Shark baiting?

We actually started up Sauerkids to kick back from daily work (although we both love our day jobs). A lot of graphic designers will recognize this. Where most of us start out as graphic designers from a background of drawing, there comes a point where you never get to draw things anymore.

There aren¹t too many clients for cute characters with cracked skulls, I guess… But I guess you mean next to Sauerkids… Well there¹s numerous things which vary from collecting Hawaii vinyl records to collecting designer toys. But we also love to play music ourselves, whether it is on the computer or
on the (steel) guitar. We always keep our eyes open for vintage steel guitars (we own a small collection of them).

And furthermore we like; walking the dog with the next door neighbor, gazing out of the window, going places (from band gigs to exhibitions), visiting thrift stores and flea markets, hanging out with friends and yes… Sword fights and Shark baiting!

FMCS: Any shows coming up soon?

Sauerkids: We’ve been invited for the upcoming Plush Week show by Gallery 1988 this February, and we just received an invitation by Yves Laroche L’Autre Galerie to participate in a group show, so that’s great!

Apart from that we have some things going on for exhibitions in Barcelona, Valencia and Sydney this summer. We’ve also been invited by a gallery over here in Rotterdam to curate a show this spring. ..So that should be fun.

FMCS: Thanks for the quick chat any shout outs?

Sauerkids: First of all: Thank you FMCS for this interview! Furthermore we want say ‘HI’ to our dearest friend Tommy Kane, not only a great artist, but also one of the nicest people we met via the internet.

And also to all our dear friends and fellow artists who supported us from the start: Annie Owens from Hi-Fructose (no one ever said such nice things about Sauerkids before), Alex Devon, Max-o-matic, Brandt Peters, Cain from Playtimes, Tony aka Chick, Russel Etchen, Dirk van Ginkel, Ferg, Femke Hiemstra, Martina and Frank at MF Gallery, Beck Wheeler, Jeremy Dower, Jason at Popcling and Daisy and Gerard at Highland toys.

And remember: if God exists he would paint like the Clayton Brothers…

SAURKIDS
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