While painting, images of birds and the news about the American presidential election flashed through her head at the end of 2016. ‘Then I came across a male figure, which became a rooster, a blower jaw, sticking his head forward. One and one became two. He was there. I couldn’t do much below that. It became a belly. That wasn’t enough. We still had to add a penis’, Edith Meijering said in the radio program One today†
Nasty Trump, Donald Trump in a dark bird costume with bare genitals, is probably Meijering’s best-known work. It is illustrative of her working method: she painted her emotions. It arose out of ‘pure annoyance’. “I really hate that man,” she told Omroep Gelderland. It came to hang on the Nasty Womanexhibition in San Diego, California. Two women had called on female artists on Facebook to speak out in response to statements by Trump (‘I grab them by the pussy’†
Nearly seven hundred artists from all over the world submitted work. The proceeds of the sold artworks went to Planned Parenthood, an organization where women can go for an abortion. Meijering sent copies that sold for thirty dollars. The original is in her studio.
Meijering lived elsewhere in Zutphen, but her studio was her home, her source, her hiding place, says her cousin Roosmarijn Ernst. She was often there late into the night. Ernst was at home with her sisters. ‘We grew up in her studio.’ They took for granted that their aunt was not always the easiest. ‘There could be thunderstorms and the sun could shine. Also at the same time.’ The door was always open, it was a sweet thought. Meijering liked to talk about her work, taught her visitors to look and believed that everyone can make art themselves. If you dare.
The tension between man and nature and between man and animal is central to her work. “It’s not a choice, it’s a necessity. It’s like breathing, an inner urge’, she said in an interview with the Zutphense Museum Henriëtte Polak, which exhibited her work. “Her way of drawing and painting is fluid, colors blend wet into wet and the end result may have dried up, but you still have the feeling that the emotion is dripping off,” art critic Rob Smolders wrote on his website.
The studio is packed with drawings, collages, watercolors and paintings. The single Meijering found it difficult to part with her works of art, which she regarded as her children. Ernst will be building a digital archive of the several thousand works, ranging from an A4 drawing to framed paintings measuring two by two metres. The family hopes that the studio will be preserved. ‘Maybe it could become a museum,’ says Ernst. ‘She deserves it. There was only one of Edith.’
Onno Maurer, director of the Museum Flehite in Amersfoort, ‘picked up some of her fascinating oeuvre’ for an exhibition of paintings of landscapes. ‘She had added all sorts of things to illustrations of romantic landscapes from the 17th and 18th centuries that she had torn from art books. Refined and with a passionate hand, large stripes and subtle figures. Above all, quirky and enchanting.’
In her last newsletter (22 December), Meijering wrote that she would spend a lot of time in her studio in the coming period. ‘I would like to receive you for a conversation and a lot of art. Then we can ring in the old year and usher in the new year with amazement, awake, alert, graceful and sensitive.’ On January 1, Meijering was admitted to hospital in Zutphen, where she died on January 13. She was 59 years old.
Maurer: ‘She deserves a retrospective exhibition and a book.’