Digital Voices

Listen to Kendra’s speech here 

I believe in art. By art I don’t just mean painting and drawing, I also mean poetry and music. In my mind all these things are a type of art. Different types of art have been used for as long as humans have been around. There are hieroglyphics to paintings on pottery, to music and poems. Each form of art can tell a story, express a feeling, or give us some sort of glimpse into the past and how people used to live. Not only is it a way of expression, but it can also help people through a hard time in their life. I’ve found that art has helped me and some of my friends through certain difficulties.

Up until about my sophomore year everything seemed to be going good. But once I got into tenth grade a friend of mine, who was like a brother to me, passed away. I had grown up with him and he was someone that was an important part of my life. I found it unfair that he had died when he was so young. Music, poetry, and drawing became a big part of my life after that, I started listening to music whenever I got the chance and I would find pictures that I wanted to draw. The pictures that I found were usually “happy” pictures but when I drew them I gave them a dark side. This was only one way that the way I was feeling was let out.

Poetry is something I got into doing once the drawing stopped helping me express the pain that I was feeling. At first the only thing I did was read poems, but eventually I started writing my own. It was the only way, at the time; I could get out my feelings without actually telling people what was going on. Also, by doing these things I became closer to some of my friends that were going through similar situations. They were also using art as a way to show the pain that they were feeling.

All these different kinds of art usually just start as something small but eventually they erupt into something bigger. For example, drawings and paintings start as an image in a persons mind and once on the piece of paper or canvas they become something bigger and a lot of the times something beautiful. Poetry is a feeling put on paper that tells a story of one feeling by one person, and music is simply a type of a poem put to music. Art has always been around and it’s something I think is here to stay.