Brief aan Jan Veth Possibly 1907

This "Brief aan Jan Veth" by Johan Huizinga is a letter, and like all letters, it's a record of a process, a mark of time, and of thought. It's writing, so it's a cousin of drawing. Look at the way the ink sits on the page – pools in places, almost disappearing in others. You can almost feel the pressure of his hand and the drag of the pen. The letter is filled with a lovely, faded script, the personal made public, and I love the way that something intimate becomes something to be viewed and considered. You can see him grappling with words and ideas; you sense his presence through the materiality of the writing. Each stroke and flourish tells a story, and it's up to us to fill in the gaps, like Cy Twombly’s scrawls, looping and connecting across the page. This piece reminds me of the letters of Paul Thek, another artist interested in the everyday, who saw correspondence as a way of working through ideas, and whose letters can be seen as works of art in themselves. Art is always in conversation, a way of thinking through making, a record of our shared, imperfect existence.