Make money doing the work you believe in
Illustrated Letters. Today I got lost in 170 of these in Liz Kirwin’s More Than Words. Before email, artists wrote letters that were also drawings. Someone sent me a handwritten letter once that I’ve kept for twenty years. I couldn’t tell you the text of a single email from the same period. Looking at these, the drawing and the writing completely inseparable, I think what’s gone isn’t just handwriting. It’s a certain kind of slowness in how we address each other. Private thinking that accidentally became art.
Van Gogh wrote: “What is drawing? How does one get there? It’s working one’s way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.” Artist John Graham put it differently in a letter to his wife: “Letter writing is probably the most beautiful manifestation in human relations, in fact, it is its finest residue.”
The Archives of American Art holds thousands of artist letters like these. A portion of them are illustrated. Van Gogh alone wrote over 800 letters in his lifetime, many with sketches.
Bellow letters by: Man Ray, Yves Saint-Laurent, Alfred Joseph Frueh, Rockwell Kent, George Grosz. More in the link below form More Than Words: Illustrated Letters from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art
