Gedicht uit archief Philip Zilcken Possibly 1913 - 1930

Albert Verwey made this poem “Gedicht uit archief Philip Zilcken” with ink on paper and it feels like a letter, a message arriving from another time. I imagine Verwey hunched over a desk, the nib of his pen scratching across the page, each word a deliberate stroke, building into lines, the lines building into stanzas. The ink looks dense, pooling in places, creating a relief that catches the light. The Dutch language is foreign to me, but you can almost hear its sounds. The paper seems aged, with a kind of gentle decay. It feels intimate, like holding a piece of someone's thoughts, a fragile artifact of a creative act. It reminds me of the physical process of painting, the layering of brushstrokes, the materiality of the medium, and how those elements shape our experience of the work. Verwey’s handwriting also evokes the work of Cy Twombly, where writing and drawing merge in a poetic, almost illegible script. Artists are always in conversation, their ideas echoing across time and inspiring new acts of creation.