Brief aan A. van der Boom Possibly 1930 - 1938

This is a letter, ‘Brief aan A. van der Boom’, by Richard Nicolaüs Roland Holst, penned in 1930 with ink on paper. The strokes are so delicate, almost frail, aren’t they? You can see each individual hair of the brush, even in reproduction. It’s so different from the bold strokes of oil on canvas, more of a tentative, searching line. The paper has aged, a kind of mottled yellow, and the ink is a pale grey. The writing is loopy and informal, like a casual conversation. I wonder what he's saying? There’s a real intimacy in handwriting, you get a sense of the person behind the words, their mood, their energy. The whole letter feels like a little glimpse into the artist's world, a moment frozen in time. Holst was quite a prolific artist, and also a stained glass artist. You can imagine these strokes translated into thick lines of lead in a window, with the spaces between them filled with coloured glass. It reminds me of the handwritten letters of Cy Twombly too, the way the marks become a kind of abstract language. Art is always a conversation, after all.