Lijst met zinnen in Pidgin Engels c. 1916 - 1945

Reijer Stolk made this drawing, “Lijst met zinnen in Pidgin Engels”, with pencil on paper. I love that it feels like a page torn straight out of a notebook, a spontaneous eruption of thought and language. The Pidgin English phrases scrawled across the page are so evocative. The texture of the paper is visible beneath the lines, giving it a ghostly presence. Check out the way the words are crammed together, some almost illegible, as though Stolk was racing to capture a fleeting idea. Then there is the doodled star shape that almost looks like a flower. It seems to be a way to mark out a new stanza. For me, it brings to mind the work of Cy Twombly, another artist who embraced the messy, imperfect beauty of handwritten marks. Stolk’s drawing reminds us that art is not always about polished perfection; it’s often in the raw, unfiltered moments that we find the most profound connections.