Common Application Essay: My Playground

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• published: 30 Jun 2016
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I worked on this essay for over 2 weeks and am quite proud of it; although it is not perfect. Here is the essay if you want to read. If you like it, make sure to subscribe! Thanks! My Playground After a long day in school, I would burst out of my house and run to the playground as fast as I could. My mind was free to roam. Several hours of sitting had made my body restless. One moment, I was at an ordinary playground with my friends. In the blink of an eye, I could feel every bead of sweat slowly drip down my back as I gripped the rusty sword tighter. I was standing in a dragon’s lair with my fellow knights, frantically avoiding deadly flames coming out of the dragon’s mouth. I entered a completely new world unrestrained by any rules. I imagined. Eventually, however, I discovered a new medium for my imagination. Art. I began to pour my ideas out onto paper in various colors and tones. Art became my new playground for mental experimentation and exploration. When I was in third grade, I smiled when I learned that my mother signed me up for my first art class. My eyes beamed whenever I went; the environment encouraged me to explore a torrent of ideas that roared through my mind. I learned about the never-ending combinations of colors and techniques that can be used to create. I made pieces depicting my favorite animals, scenes from Star Wars, and traffic lights which I stared at every day after dinner. Creating a wide variety of artwork gave me the opportunity to test different techniques I had learned, expanding my artistic and imaginative abilities. Still, I felt a void. I was missing a purpose in my art. In high school, I was able to bring my artistic development to a new level. Since ninth grade, I have longed to go to my two-dimensional art class every day after waking up each morning. With the open style of Mrs. Miller’s classes, I discovered the role of art as a form of communication. The classes not only taught styles such as impressionism and surrealism, but also gave us freedom to explore. Through middle school, I let my imagination flow into each piece, but I did not think about what the pieces conveyed. Not until high school did I discover a true purpose in crafting artwork, when I determined that I wanted to communicate messages to people through my art. From then on, I always thought about what each of my pieces expressed. One of the highlights of my high school portfolio is my divided portrait. It depicts fragments of three faces of red, blue, and brown, from three corners of the world molded together to create one face. I wanted to express the universality of humankind and the importance of looking past external differences to build relationships. The idea came after a trip to China, during which I gave presentations about my American life to a group of students at a tourism school. Even though the students and I were products of different cultures, I felt a connection. Each of the students wrote a heartwarming card that spoke to me with a different voice. I am honored that my portrait was displayed in the Peggy Crosby Gallery, at the Orlando Museum of Art. I hope that as I continue to create more art, I will be able to influence others through it. Even though my friends and I have outgrown imagining ourselves as dragon-slaying knights on the playground, our imagination lives on in my art. Many of my artworks depict things that do not exist in the real world; but imagination allows me to express ideas that once only existed in the deepest corners of my mind. Implementing imagination in art has helped me in understanding the world and its people. Art has not only given me inner satisfaction but has also inspired me to strive to make an impact in the world.