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This literary 'meditation' leads Patricia Hampl from a Matisse painting, which first arrested her attention, along all kinds of trails back to the Matisse painting. Hampl is not an art historian, but an artist in prose and poetry. It is her 'word paintings' that make this quest for the sublime such a joy to read. "Travel," writes Hampl of artists' travels and her own, "alerts the eye and humbles the hand. Its final destination is radiance: to be transported, as the mystics say." In that sense, "Blue Arabesque" is a travel memoir, which opens new windows to the world.
