Brief aan Philip Zilcken 1911 - 1930

This letter to Philip Zilcken by Rose Imel, was written sometime in the 1920’s in what looks to be blue ink. You can see the artist really committed to the task in hand, filling the page with tight, rhythmic lines of script, a kind of dance of writing and thinking. The ink has a real presence, sitting up on the surface of the paper almost like a thread, you can almost see the individual fibres and the absorbency of the page, as if the letter is not just an exercise in communication, but of thinking, feeling and making. In the top left you can see how the ink fades and pools, and little imperfections in the flow, giving the image a real, almost tactile quality, like a painting or a drawing. There’s a kinship to be felt here with the later work of Cy Twombly, who also had a knack for elevating the act of writing into a visual art form. It highlights how all art forms are really just a kind of conversation, a dialogue between ideas and generations.