From sidewalk chalk as a tot to whiteboard walls as a teenager, senior Rose Kennedy has made herself known for decorating otherwise drab spaces.
With a mix of dry-erase markers during speech and debate tournaments, Kennedy occupies herself by drawing murals in the hallway near the debate room.
Junior Trent Blettner, a member of the speech and debate team, described his initial reaction as “amazement” and “bewilderment” at Kennedy’s talent.
“I’m always really impressed by the amount of time and effort she puts into it,” Blettner said.
Kennedy’s talent for drawing has been practiced since she was a child because she has always been into drawing.
“My parents took me to a lot of dinner parties and art gallery openings,” Kennedy said. “And I did not want to talk to adults, so sometimes I’d get tired so I would just hide under a table and draw.”
For Kennedy, art is a way to express herself throughout the halls of LHS, where some walls are painted so they can be drawn on with whiteboard markers.
“Art is kind of like a way for people to express how they feel and what they think without verbally saying it,” Kennedy said. “And it’s so uniquely human to express yourself creatively.”
Kennedy, who is known for expressing her creative side through animation, believes that all forms of art have importance.
“Art can be an expression about deeper traumas or it can just be a poem about a turtle,” Kennedy said. ‘I’m just drawing on whiteboards for fun in a public high school, and I think that is important because other people find it important.”
Speech and Debate coach Jeff Plinsky said he enjoys seeing the mural every time he walks in the hallway.
“I love having it over there because it gives me a nice, bright, fun, positive thing to look at every day,” Plinsky said. “So no matter how my day has gone or is going I’ve got this, this artistic piece where, every time I look at it, I see something different in it, because there’s so much going on.”
Kennedy plans to continue building her creative side in college next year.
“I actually want to go into creative writing, and that’s what I’m majoring in, creative writing and film, because I want to be a television show writer,” Kennedy said.
