Location
Monserrat
Start Date
26-6-2026 3:30 PM
End Date
26-6-2026 5:00 PM
Description
While some tourism activities can be a positive obstacle to awareness and connection, other tourism activities, like drawing, can lead to inner development, wonder, and a heightened experience. A traveller’s activity of sketching and drawing is a meditative exercise in concentration and focus that can transform one’s experience and enhance their perception. It often facilitates the experience of connection to the place being drawn; to nature; and to a community. If developed as a frequent habit, drawing can be a character-building activity with virtues that continue even after the act of drawing is over. It is a method of altering the way one sees their everyday environment. It triggers feeling of gratitude as well as expressing it. It can dignify the subject of the drawing as something worth noticing. It creates bonds with the people and places that the tourist is visiting.
Drawing on the author’s personal experiences, and the insight of philosophers, psychologists, and artists, the paper will argue that a tourist drawing can be an act of “reverence’ without needing to, or intending to, produce a work of ‘art.’ It is an active response to a place, rather than a passive viewing of a place. Drawing often results in a ‘peak experience,’ which is described by Abraham Maslow as being at the ‘core’ of every religion. Psychologically these experiences are described in terms of deep engagement, and a sense of holistic connection and intimate relation with the subject of the drawing.
This philosophical language might create exaggerated expectations on the part of the tourist/sketcher; however, the benefits of drawing do not come from the end-product of pleasing pictures, but rather from the act of being present in a place for a short time.
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Included in
L3) Drawing, Religious Experience and the Pilgrim’s Mind
Monserrat
While some tourism activities can be a positive obstacle to awareness and connection, other tourism activities, like drawing, can lead to inner development, wonder, and a heightened experience. A traveller’s activity of sketching and drawing is a meditative exercise in concentration and focus that can transform one’s experience and enhance their perception. It often facilitates the experience of connection to the place being drawn; to nature; and to a community. If developed as a frequent habit, drawing can be a character-building activity with virtues that continue even after the act of drawing is over. It is a method of altering the way one sees their everyday environment. It triggers feeling of gratitude as well as expressing it. It can dignify the subject of the drawing as something worth noticing. It creates bonds with the people and places that the tourist is visiting.
Drawing on the author’s personal experiences, and the insight of philosophers, psychologists, and artists, the paper will argue that a tourist drawing can be an act of “reverence’ without needing to, or intending to, produce a work of ‘art.’ It is an active response to a place, rather than a passive viewing of a place. Drawing often results in a ‘peak experience,’ which is described by Abraham Maslow as being at the ‘core’ of every religion. Psychologically these experiences are described in terms of deep engagement, and a sense of holistic connection and intimate relation with the subject of the drawing.
This philosophical language might create exaggerated expectations on the part of the tourist/sketcher; however, the benefits of drawing do not come from the end-product of pleasing pictures, but rather from the act of being present in a place for a short time.