Creative Sketching and the Traveller’s Experience

Resumo

  I do not understand what is wanted here.

The act of creative sketching can enhance a traveller's experience in many ways. Drawings are much more than snapshot recordings of a place or thing. The value of sketching lies in the meditative process rather than an aesthetic evaluation of the product. Sketching is a way of creating reverence, and dignifying the subject. 

Paul Woodruff explains the idea of reverence as being contextual and situational. Reverence is like a language, he says, in that it is not an isolated activity (Woodruff, 2014). Woodruff writes about music and theatre and justice, as examples of reverence. Drawing could be included in his analysis. For example, drawing the inside of a church, or a couple resting on a bench, is perceived as respectful rather than intrusive and voyeuristic. This is a contextual activity which involves more than the isolated self of the artist.

The traveller's heightened attention on a subject is an active meditation, unlike many tourism experiences which are essentially a passive looking-at-things. The unmediated experience of drawing connects the artist to the place in ways that can strengthen one’s virtues of compassion, awe and insight. Thus, creative drawing can be described as a type of “ethical labour” (Smith & Duffy, 2004).

Frederick Franck describes drawing as a way of "retrieving the lost art of seeing" (Franck 1993). In an almost unconscious proprioception between vision, mind and hand, sketching is an activity that transcends routine perception, and results in what could be described as a religious experience. 

Similarly, the 'peak experiences' described by Abraham Maslow (Maslow, 1970), and the 'flow' experiences described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), both involve an immersive activity that creates a feeling of oneness and connection to all of existence. This is a lot to claim on behalf of a modest tourist activity, but it is a common observation amongst religious thinkers. William James, for example, writes in his Varieties of Religious Experience, that one variety of that experience is the "grateful admiration of the gift of existence" (James, 2012, p. 83). Sketching is the very instantiation of this response to existence.