Don't Mess With Texas

We are in Texas and are having a great visit with Katy Kathryn and the Gibbs. We have eaten, shopped, and visited. We spent a morning with Katy visiting her friends at the tax firm where she worked and also made a stop at the house where she lives in the Woodlands.

We had a rainy art afternoon in downtown Houston visiting the Rothko Chapel which is essentially a place for meditation and personal worship built by some Rothko-loving connoisseurs. You may not be a Rothko fan, but the space meets its intended purpose very well.

Nearby is the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, opened in February 1997 with a display of masterworks from the 13th century. These frescoes were stolen out of a chapel in Cyprus in the 1980s, cut into 38 pieces, and shipped to Germany by thieves prepared to sell them in the arts black-market. The 38 fresco fragments were bought from the thieves by the same art lovers who built the Rothko chapel, restored in London, and placed in a black box of a building with a spectacular chapel of frosted glass.

A couple of blocks away is the Museum of Art, Houston, where we visited an impressionist exhibit on loan from the National Gallery in Washington. The museum is very good, and the exhibit was excellent.

The final stop of the day was at the water wall, a spectacular urban water feature near the Galleria. It is most impressive with a huge quantity of water rushing down a sheer face of stone like a waterfall. It isn't Iguaçu Falls, but is awesome (in the true sense of the word) nonetheless.

Katy's Pollackesque room

A drive-by view of Houston from the 59

Lunch at Hugo's: Mexico-City-style Mexican food

Every dish was unique and delicious

The Rothko Chapel in the rain

The Rothkos

The Byzantine Chapel

Thick frosted-glass walls set the frescos off beautifully
and create a moving space

The girlies at the Byzantine Chapel

Katy Kathryn admiring a Modigliani

I love this Matisse

Art lovers at the Museum of Art

Katy at the water wall

The photographer at work

Katy and Alison

This is being posted from the Fairfield Inn in San Antonio; we are off to the San Antonio Temple this morning. We had some great adventures yesterday and will have more today. I will post about those as soon as I am able. The Gibbs were having some internet issues before we left, so we shall see.

That's all for now.

OXO

D.