Brief aan Philip Zilcken 1878 - 1930

This is a letter to Philip Zilcken by Richard Nicolaüs Roland Holst, written with ink on paper. Letters, like art, are evidence of process. You can see the hand of the artist, the pressure they applied, the speed of their thoughts. There is nothing obscured here. The handwriting is free, loopy, and intimate. It makes me think of Cy Twombly, another artist who embraced the gesture of writing in his work. The thinness of the ink captures every subtle movement, every hesitation. There's a vulnerability in laying yourself bare like this, isn't there? It makes you wonder, what was the nature of the conversation between Holst and Zilcken? What other forms of correspondence and shared creativity did they engage in? It invites us to imagine a world of shared artistic inquiry, and to consider the letter as a work of art in itself. There is a conversational and collaborative nature of artmaking, and this letter is evidence of that exchange of ideas.