Brief aan Jan Veth Possibly 1900 - 1918

This is a letter, addressed to Jan Veth, written by Wally Moes in 1900 with pen on paper. Imagine her hand moving across the page, the scratch of the nib as she thinks through her ideas. It’s funny when you think about letters as artworks. The way the ink pools in some places and thins in others, the pressure of the hand… the way words clump together or spread out. It must have taken Moes a long time to create this particular image, and I wonder what it felt like to her, what she was thinking as she wrote. Was it effortless, or a struggle? There is a rhythm and flow to the script, but it's hard to follow – like my own handwriting! I think of Cy Twombly, for whom writing was a form of drawing. Each mark conveys feeling and intent. I see these artists in conversation, each one building on what came before. Painting as a form of embodied expression allows ambiguity and uncertainty, meaning that there are many possible ways to understand it.