Brief aan Anna Dorothea Dirks 1875 - 1929

This is Isaac Israels’s letter to Anna Dorothea Dirks, it’s a little note written in 1921. The way Israels’s pen dances across the page, it makes me think about how writing itself can be a form of mark-making. He doesn’t seem too concerned about legibility, more about the sheer act of putting thought to paper. I wonder if he was trying to capture a fleeting thought, something too quick for careful penmanship. The shapes that make up the letters, some round, some sharp, remind me of the shapes in his paintings; loose, gestural, but always with a sense of form. Maybe this letter is a way to keep the hand moving, the mind engaged, a constant practice of seeing and translating that vision into the world. And, like any painting, it leaves me wondering what’s been revealed and what remains hidden.