Young People Use Art as Emotional Outlet
JOHN KING, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: And as our Jeanne Meserve explains here many youngsters are being encouraged to sit down and draw as an emotional outlet.</s>SHERRY WATKINS, SONGWRITER: I can't believe the horror -- the questions and the drag. How can people do this?</s>JEANNE MESERVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Sherrie Watkins (ph) says this song just poured out of her the day after the terrorists struck.</s>WATKINS: Those words didn't come from me -- they just came through me. I was just a gate.</s>MESERVE: Art is an expression of emotion and it's not uncommon for artists to find motivation in horrific events.</s>DAVID LEVY, DIRECTOR, THE CORCORAN GALLERY: When they are very powerfully motivated by profound forces in their lives such as this kind of a tragedy they -- it very often stimulates them to heights that they might otherwise not achieve.</s>MESERVE: Whether working with pastels or piano or a writer's pen the act of creating can be a catharsis.</s>CYNTHIA RIMMER, ART STUDENT: It's just a way to get things out really quickly.</s>MESERVE: These Corcoran art students were evacuated twice since the attacks because of security concerns -- their school only two blocks from the White House. On a stretch of canvas hung along a corridor they purge their emotions. Jessica McMillan drew her inspiration from news footage.</s>JESSICA MCMILLAN, ART STUDENT: When I looked at her face all I could think of was like -- is she really there, how much pain was she feeling, was she communicating</s>MESERVE: Knowing how therapeutic art can be some schools have encouraged children to draw.</s>KATHIE CLEMENTS, THIRD GRADE TEACHER: She wanted to do something beautiful and she thought of the flowers because it was too hard for her to think about the events that had taken place.</s>DAVID VICKERS, ART TEACHER: This child drawing the window repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly -- these containers -- these squares attempting in some sense to contain this -- the fears and the concerns.</s>MESERVE: Some wield their markers fiercely using strong colors, showing their agitation. But sometimes art requires a harnessing of emotion. Students evacuated from a photojournalism class at the Corcoran walked two miles to the Pentagon to capture events there following their instincts.</s>KEVIN GILBERT, PHOTOJOURNALISM INSTRUCTOR: To be thrown into the midst of one of the greatest journalist moments of our lifetime and to be right down at the Pentagon, shooting and thinking like photo journalists was incredible.</s>MESERVE: Art is not just for those who make it -- it is for those who view it or hear it. And for us, too, it can be a tonic.</s>WATKINS: One nation under God, united we will stand.</s>MESERVE: Stand and go on and create.</s>WATKINS: And all of us must stand.</s>MESERVE: Jeanne Meserve, CNN, Washington.