Notities c. 1916

This page of "Notities" by Reijer Stolk is a flurry of thoughts jotted down with ink, maybe a fountain pen. You can see the hand moving quickly across the paper. It’s so process-oriented, like a painter’s sketchbook page, where ideas are caught as they fly by. I love how the ink sits on the page, sometimes thick and pooling, other times scratchy and thin. There’s a real physicality to the medium here. The writing loops and darts, creating shapes almost as important as the words themselves. See how “August Strindberg” is boxed? That single, dark line is a gesture that stands out from the more ambiguous marks, a moment of emphasis amidst the stream of consciousness. It reminds me a little of Cy Twombly, the way he turned writing into drawing, blurring the lines between text and image. Stolk’s page isn't about fixed meanings. It's about the open-ended possibilities of art, an ongoing conversation recorded in ink.