Brief aan Willem Bogtman Possibly 1926 - 1929

This letter, made by Richard Nicolaüs Roland Holst in 1926, seems like a quick sketch in ink. Look how the marks build up, each word flowing into the next, it makes you think about artmaking as a process of building layers. The texture here is all in the writing itself, isn’t it? The colour of the ink is dark against the light paper. It's interesting how the writing fills the space, like an all-over composition where one mark is as important as another. It’s hard to tell exactly what kind of pen Holst used, but you can see the varying pressure in the lines. It's clear Holst wasn't aiming for perfection but instead focused on the act of writing. Notice how the lines often loop and intersect, creating small areas of denser mark-making. This reminds me of the automatic writing of the Surrealists, and it also makes me think of Cy Twombly, who took the personal gesture as the complete subject of the artwork. This piece celebrates the act of writing and the flow of thought. It embraces ambiguity and invites us to find our own meaning within its lines.