Brief aan Philip Zilcken Possibly 1928

This letter to Philip Zilcken was written in pen and ink by Wijnand Otto Jan Nieuwenkamp in 1928. Just look at those strokes, so precise! Like quicksilver. You can really feel the forward momentum of the writer’s hand. I think of writing as a kind of drawing, and drawing as a kind of thinking. There’s an urgency to the handwriting that’s different from a typed letter, isn’t there? I imagine Nieuwenkamp sitting at his desk, the ink flowing, each word a gesture. The ink is dark, almost black, against the pale paper. See how some lines are thick, and others thin? You can almost feel the pressure he applied. It reminds me a little of Cy Twombly, not in style, but in the way he embraced the physicality of writing, the sheer joy of mark-making. But, you know, so much of art is just a conversation across time, artists responding to what came before, trying to make sense of the world one gesture at a time.