Brief aan Willem Bogtman Possibly 1936

This is a letter written with ink on paper by Richard Nicolaüs Roland Holst. The scratchy marks are applied with a dark, almost faded ink, and the cursive style feels both intimate and immediate. For me, artmaking is about this process of making marks, of leaving a trace, a kind of personal inscription. What really grabs me here is the materiality. You can almost feel the texture of the paper, see the way the ink bleeds slightly into it. The pressure and speed of the hand that wrote the letter, the way the nib must have caught on the page. And it gives the image an emotional charge – a sense of urgency or intimacy. Look at how the lines seem to blur together in places, obscuring the words, the visual of the letter becomes as interesting as the content. It reminds me of Cy Twombly's scrawled paintings. Art becomes a conversation, a back-and-forth across time, embracing the messy and the unresolved.