Briefkaart aan Philip Zilcken Possibly 1901 - 1922

This is a postcard, probably from around 1910, addressed by Jan Toorop to Philip Zilcken. The colors are muted, almost ghostly – the green ink of the stamp and seals faded with time. It reminds me of a painting where the artist lets the underlayers peek through, revealing the history of its making. The smudged postmarks and handwritten address feel so intimate, so human. You can almost feel Toorop's hand pressing the pen to paper. It's like a little performance, a dance between the sender and the recipient, across time. The slightly blurred stamp in the upper right corner, with its intricate design, speaks of bureaucracy and the mundane rituals of communication, while the sender's private message hints at something more personal. There's a kind of beauty in the imperfection of this everyday object. It reminds me of the work of someone like Cy Twombly, who embraced the messy, the accidental, the unscripted mark. Art, like life, is an ongoing conversation, a constant exchange of ideas and feelings.