A monkey in a wig (flying buttress figurine)

One of the nicest flying buttress figurines from the series 'Noah's Ark’ by Theo van Reijn was now ready to be copied: a Monkey. The creature has an endearing belly, skinny legs and a Big Smile on its snout. And a wig.

That my sawing machine after all of the welding- and tinkering can now cut so accurately is also clearly visible in the pre-cut block. It saves quite a bit of work.

Thrift shop

The old figurines from St. Eusebius's Church are all sold for charity, by which at least a portion of the cost will be covered. Such a restoration does of course not come cheap, and this time 96 flying buttress figurines alone will have to be made. Not to mention the hundreds of other new parts for the tower and the church.

This Monkey was immediately already tremendously popular at the auction, and I think his roguish smile is to blame for that. Unfortunately, the pictures in this article are not so clear, because it was bad weather with very flat light when I finished the figurine. But perhaps it is not a cheerful smile at all, but rather a wan face from abdominal pain!

The Monkey Blues?

The original statue was made around the years 1953. In those days, there were many deer parks and zoos with a monkey cage, where you could feed the monkeys yourself. Especially on Sundays whole families of people would buy a bag of peanuts, to throw the 'monkey nuts’ towards the primates, sitting a bit glum behind wire mesh on a bare rock. It may be clear that the monkeys did not always get a balanced diet, and would have had to make do with the peanuts that sometimes were thrown with paper bag and all. On other days they would no doubt have gotten better food. I myself have, though that was 15 years later, vivid memories of the deer park, with ominous signs saying that plastic bags were not good for the deer. "If you give the animals plastic, it's certain that soon none of them will survive.’ Perhaps that's how our monkey got his bulging edema belly?

Nasty the following flying buttress image.