The Power of Drawing Visuals

Anasthasia Shilov is a high school student at Hinsdale Central Secondary and she is passionate about pursuing a career in medicine -- she gives a powerful talk about the influence of drawing. Aside from her career goals, she enjoys activities such as reading, music, movie watching, and creating artwork. She grew up in a home that encouraged these artistic elements, with a photographer father and a mother dedicated to raising her children in environments friendly to culture and creativity. Drawing influence from this, she creates art that represents messages from a macro perspective -- recently highlighting the true power of selection and emphasis.

She begins her talk by explaining how creating art has allowed her to overcome some of life's biggest burdens, pushing new boundaries of what drawing can do through concepts. She explains that art became a part of her self-identity without even realizing it, as it drew her attention away from the time she was overweight due to the praise she'd get for her work. Her second encounter followed when she was 15 when her father suddenly passed away -- she was terrified to put her grief into words. Instead, she did what she knew best and drew a picture, drawing influence from her father's photography work and as a result, there were little photographs of himself. Art became a tool for her to deal with her burdens, as creating enables the ability to choose what one wants to say, how much one wants to show, or to be as vague or explicit as one chooses to be. It is a way to speak without speaking, to share without oversharing, and to mourn without crying.