At the Paul Klee Center in Bern today, my wife Andrea and I saw an exhibition of work by the Brazilian artist Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), which ranges from painting and landscape architecture to tapestries and a personal hand-painted tablecloth. I especially enjoyed his colorful designs for gardens, which looked from afar like abstract paintings by Wassily Kandinsky or Klee himself. A model for a sculpture in a park in the Brazilian city of Uberlândia touchingly reminded me of sculptures I made out of scrap pieces of wood when I was in sixth grade. When I mentioned that association to Andrea, she said, "I knew you were going to say that."Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 October 2026)