‘I was struck by a painting’

Mieke Mintjes writes poetry collection ‘Madness of war’

Following the 80th commemoration of Operation Market Garden, Renkum artist Albert Ziëck was commissioned to make 30 paintings as part of Miraculous Projects. Albert posted his work on Facebook, which the Heelsum poet Mieke Mintjes also saw, she was struck by one of those paintings and wrote a poem about it and that poem touched Albert again. This resulted in a beautiful collaboration between artist and poet. The result is the poetry collection ‘Madness of War’, which will be presented in Heelsom on King’s Day.

Albert and I have known each other for years and we regularly worked together, says Mieke in her home in Heelsum, where the dining table is still full of the
poems written for the collection. He set up this project together with entrepreneur Hans de Kruijff and former Vitesse football player Ruud Knol. He made them enthusiastic to also publish a collection of poems. It was quite a job. Creating 30 poems in a month I worked on it from early in the morning until often late at night. I also looked for background information for each work of art and from there I started writing poetry.

Read the entire article on the Rijn en Veluwe.nl website