Brief aan Philip Zilcken before 1918

This letter to Philip Zilcken was written by Rose Imel sometime in the first half of the 20th century. It's wild to think of this piece as an artwork, but I love it! The letter looks like a ground, and the penmanship like a dance of lines across that ground. It's like she's scored her own thoughts, and composed a kind of calligraphy, a notation of being. I can imagine Rose bent over her desk, the scratching of the pen her only sound. Maybe the words tumbled out, a torrent of thoughts and feelings she needed to get down on paper. Or perhaps each word was carefully chosen, a deliberate act of communication and connection. The way the ink bleeds into the paper, those looping ascenders and descenders… There's a real physicality to the writing, an embodiment of thought. Rose is right there in the letter, her presence alive and palpable. And in this simple gesture—one artist reaching out to another—we glimpse the ongoing conversation that is art, across time and space.