Kaylie Tennant, an exceptionally talented artist, is a graduating senior at Bedford High School. After just finishing up her Bedford art journey, Tennant has a varied array of finished projects that demonstrate her abilities, as shown in the IB Art show.

One of her larger-scale projects began with embroidery, which she started in the summer before her senior year. It started as just a patch, but as the project developed, Tennant decided the artwork would be better displayed in a wearable format on a hoodie. The thought-provoking piece, aptly named “Window to the Soul,” is composed with a beautiful analogous color scheme of yellows, reds, and pinks and ‘leans into the unrealistic side” of life. The piece depicts a large watching eye on the chest, within an 8-point star, with smaller stars scattered across the entire body of the hoodie. The work as a whole took 50 to 60 hours, and Tennant describes the process as both “fun and tedious.”

In addition to her embroidery work, Tenannt dabbled with graffiti for her senior portfolio, and she says this process was difficult at first since it’s such an improvised and unplanned art form. The piece she produced was named “If It Isn’t Broken” and has an organic look produced using stencils and newspaper clippings. The large skull was painted using wall paint instead of acrylic or oil. Tennant claims she was initially “scared to use the spray paint” since it’s “not what I’m [she’s] used to,” however, she was excited to “step out of my [her] comfort zone and not worry about perfection.” Tennant explains she wanted the symbolism of gentrification and graffiti to really shine through in her work and show how artwork can truly make a place all the more beautiful. This project took around 30 hours of dedication but was planned out with clear intricacy, which can be seen in the minute details of the final piece.

The third piece, “Quite the Handful,” was inspired purely by a random person Tennant noticed on the street. Painted for a Normal Rockwell project, the goal was to capture regular people going about their everyday lives. Tennant explains when she saw the man in the painting out and about running his errands, she “thought he looked so cool, he’s just doing it all,” and that was what represented normal people, just out doing it all. The painting was mainly watercolors and colored pencils with an acrylic background.

This fall, Tennant will be attending Keene College for psychology, and she plans to continue her artwork as a major or minor alongside her psychology studies. This is a skill she honed during the Covid years in lockdown, and she found it to be her “biggest period of artistic growth” and a great coping mechanism. In her own words, “it won’t make me feel worse to draw,” but it could certainly make things better, which is why it’s so important to continue with the things that fulfill you.