Brief aan Philip Zilcken Possibly 1901 - 1909

This is a letter to Philip Zilcken, made in 1901 with pen on paper. It’s all about the touch, you know? The way the ink bleeds ever so slightly into the paper, the varying pressure of the nib creating thicks and thins in the lines - it’s a dance between the writer and the page. Look at the signature at the bottom. The way the letters loop and swirl, almost like a little abstract drawing. It's so physical, this act of writing. You can almost feel the hand moving across the page, making decisions, leaving its mark. It reminds me that art is always a conversation, a back-and-forth between intention and accident. There's something about the immediacy of writing, like Cy Twombly's messy scrawls, that gets right to the heart of things. It's not about perfection, it's about presence.