Untitled composition 1964

This untitled composition is by Rene Bertholo. I can imagine him creating this out of a stream of consciousness. Just letting the ink flow, and forms emerge and tangle on the page. There's a kind of collage element here, things piling up, some kind of machine is in play. You can see his mark-making. It’s very fine, but not precious, it's more like a puzzle of the mind. Maybe he started with a few key images or forms, and then let the rest accumulate around them, like an ecosystem building itself. I think of other artists who worked with playful accumulation, like Jim Nutt or Elizabeth Murray, and others who are assembling fragments of lived experience. It's like the artist's mind is a workshop where ideas and images get tested, combined, and transformed. And isn’t that what art is all about? One artist throwing an idea into the mix, and another picking it up years later, turning it over, and finding something new in it.