Iberian Sketchbook: Travel Writing and Digital Storytelling

Catalog description

Sketching is a form of active observation. While a photograph effortlessly takes in countless details from a scene, in a drawing from life the hand executes only what the eye actively observes (or imagines). This act not only records a scene, but fundamentally alters the act of seeing, making it eminently active and alert. Whether or not the drawer is an artist, and regardless of skill, keeping a sketchbook forges a new relationship with one's surroundings, helping the observer internalize and assimilate people, places, and things. In this course, we will take inspiration from the ways in which multiple authors and writers have used the sketch- taken in the broad sense, to include not just drawings, but other forms of written, visual, and aural output based on close observation of place- to negotiate a relations hupi places both foreign and familiar, as we, too, humbly sketch out way into the minute details that make up our new setting here in Spain.