I have loved art ever since I can remember. It has inspired me through difficult times, connected me with my peers and brought me as much joy and learning as team sports have for others. When I was young, my parents would often take me on walks along Museum Mile in New York City. We’d spend hours strolling through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and the Frick. The appreciation for art that my parents instilled in me at a young age became the inspiration for my study of art in high school.

Since beginning my high school's studio art program my freshman year, my understanding of art has developed significantly. The curriculum is sequential. Once students reach the intermediate level, we can choose to take art as a major course, which means that art classes meet as often as other core academic subjects. In 10^th grade, I decided to embark on the art major track, which has allowed me to explore visual art with more intensity and focus, study significant artists and art periods, and make connections between art and culture. My teachers have helped me learn how to analyze art with a critical eye and cultivate my own vision.

This past year in AP Studio Art, my work has focused on the ways people experience art on emotional, spiritual and intellectual levels. My concentration is particularly exciting to me, because it represents how much we all have in common. Appreciating art is a shared experience that cuts across time, culture, age, gender, race and religion.

With charcoal, I draw people of diverse backgrounds as they look at a wide range of artwork, both contemporary and earlier works. To fully capture the significance of each piece of art, I pay close attention to its details as well as the frame in which it sits. I chose to draw in black and white so to keep the focus solely on the subjects. Looking through some of my concentration, you will see that each piece has a different story behind it.

1. An older woman scrutinizes the composition of Piet Mondrian’s abstract modernist paintings.

2. An orthodox Jewish woman draws John Singer Sargent’s painting Albert de Bellerocheon her iPad.

3. A young woman thinks deeply about Kazimir Malevich's abstract geometric paintings with her sketchbook in hand.

4. An art student looks over to her classmates after taking a photo of an abstract landscape painting at a small gallery in Chelsea, New York.

5. Two tourists discuss Claude Monet's painting Vétheuil in Summer at the Met’s impressionist exhibit.

5. A man uses graphite to draw the 18th century bronze statue Winter, by Jean Antoine Houdon, in an European Sculpture and Decorative Arts exhibit.

Crafting my concentration was challenging, but in capturing other people’s experiences with art, my own appreciation and love for art grew. The people I draw have unique and personal interactions with art. But, the shared experience of connecting with art, regardless of its meaning and style, unites them. As art gives us windows into worlds and times beyond our own, it motivates us to seek understanding of circumstances beyond our own.