We’ve had a very rainy few days late this summer. But I can’t deny I love rainy days in the summer, most especially when I can spend some portion of them wandering around the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, which is inevitably almost completely abandoned on such days. This Sunday, I spent a little over two hours there in the rain, at least an hour of which I was barefoot, my toes squishing in the mud, my feet sliding over wet grasses, and my heels holding up the flow of the stream that gurgles down through the lower meadows. Almost as much time was spent sitting quietly around the Japanese pond, with the ripples and bubbles of thousands of rain drops marking its surface, and the intermittent koi leaping from below.
“I hope I have made it clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but that the paintings are very far from being perfect – completely removed in fact – even as we ourselves are.”
-Agnes Martin, excerpted from “Notes,” in Writings (Cantz, 1992)
