Brief aan Philip Zilcken Possibly 1914 - 1919

This letter, penned by Frans Erens to Philip Zilcken in The Hague, September 14, 1914, isn’t exactly a painting, but you can sense the artist's hand in every stroke of the pen. Imagine Erens hunched over his desk, the nib scratching against the paper as he forms each word. The ink pools and thins, creating a rhythm of light and dark, a dance across the page. I wonder what he was thinking about as he wrote. Was he choosing each word carefully, savoring its weight and texture? The letter feels like a performance, a conversation frozen in time. The letter becomes a form of mark-making, of composition, like a landscape rendered in language. It makes me think about the work of Cy Twombly, whose scribbled canvases always felt like intimate letters to the world. Ultimately, art is about communication, about reaching out and connecting with someone across time and space. It's about leaving a trace of yourself, a whisper in the wind.