Summer Journal Entries:Creativity

This summer has been very stressful for me due to finding the best ideas possible in order to help someone not only from the community but that has been suffering tremendously over the past two years due to the Covid situation. She is known by the name of Abuela and she lives in Villa Real with almost nothing to her name apart from being one of the first people living in this district. I wanted to give her something that wasn’t a materialistic object that probably wouldn’t mean anything to myself or her, so I decided to buy a canvas and paint her something she has been living with her entire life, which is the beautiful Costa Rican sunset. This painting took me a variety of days for the shadings, and specific colouring to fade properly, it was a very stressful process due to the paint going absolutely everywhere you can imagine but the end result was amazing. After a couple of days the painting was done, and I drove to Villa Real to hand her the art piece. I handed her the painting that I made for her and I remember looking at her and all I could see was a beautiful smile from a woman who didn’t have a lot and that was extremely grateful for what was given to her. This experience was extremely rewarding and absolutely heartwarming, and it really made a large impact in my life by seeing someone who doesn’t have a lot and be so happy over something small and symbolic. The IB learner outcome that connected with this project the most was to show commitment and perseverance in CAS experiences, this is true because painting something from a large Canvas takes a lot of time, patience, creativity and effort. This was an individual project that I took the time to brainstorm, buy supplies, patiently paint layer by layer, so the commitment shown within this project is clearly visible and projected powerfully through the painting. This activity connects and is involved with two specific IB learner profile traits which is caring and open-minded because I had to think of a way to give back to this woman in a symbolic way that connects with her life by finding all possible ideas that could really affect this woman positively. I showed caring by really investigating her life by hearing many of her past stories and they mostly connect to the sunset by representing her as the sun to show that it will fade into darkness but will come back stronger the next day.