Envelop aan Philip Zilcken before 1913

This envelope was sent to Philip Zilcken at some point, by Ernst Wilhelm Moes. It’s all in the details here, isn’t it? The loops and flourishes of the ink address are full of personality. I love how the writing almost dances across the surface, each word a little different. The way the ink pools and fades tells its own story of the writer's hand, their pauses and pressures. And then there’s the stamp – a little burst of red, meticulously placed, with its own graphic weight. The postmark is a beautiful mess, smudging the date and place into a kind of abstract poetry. You can almost feel the history in its imperfections, the journey it took, the hands it passed through. It reminds me of Cy Twombly’s scrawls, a celebration of the imperfect and the human. It suggests to me that everything communicates.