Smiley Workshop

On the day of the workshop, I arrived at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg with round canvases, paints, brushes and a large inspiration board I had prepared in advance. From the very beginning, I wanted the space to feel different from a place where children are shown an example and then asked to reproduce it carefully. Instead, everything was intended as an invitation to look, touch, compare, choose and gradually develop an idea of their own.

Perhaps this is one of the things I have been thinking about most while working with children lately: how deeply our environment can influence our sense of creative freedom.

It was important to me that the children worked with real art materials  the same kind of materials I use in my own artistic practice. There is a subtle but meaningful shift that happens here. A child is not given a generic “children’s craft set,” but a canvas, paints, a palette and brushes; they are not sitting at a school desk but working inside a museum. Suddenly, this is no longer simply an activity in which they are expected to make something with their hands. For an hour and a half, they are given the opportunity to feel like artists themselves and, perhaps, to take their own decisions a little more seriously.

The museum space added another dimension to this feeling. Freiraum at the MK&G offers air, movement and the possibility of stepping away from a work, looking at it from a distance, walking over to the inspiration board, returning to the canvas and changing one’s mind. I like to think that creativity needs this kind of air not only physically, but internally as well. A space between the question and the answer, where you do not have to know immediately what the “right” decision is.

The group itself was equally important to me. German and Ukrainian children, as well as children with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, met in the same space. And art did something it often does very naturally: it created common ground where sharing exactly the same vocabulary was no longer essential for communication. The children looked at the colors others were choosing, talked about paints, compared their Smileys and asked each other about their ideas. What could have been a language barrier gradually stopped being the central issue.

I deliberately did not create one finished Smiley for everyone to reproduce. Instead, there was an inspiration board  artists, colors, familiar images and different ways of working with the smiling face as a symbol. The children could return to it whenever they wanted, notice something new, take a single detail from it or, on the contrary, realize that they wanted to do something completely different. This is how I believe inspiration should work: not by providing an answer, but by setting the next thought in motion.

And perhaps the most interesting moment came when the children stopped looking at me and started looking at their own work.

Everyone had a different rhythm. Some knew almost immediately what they wanted to do and worked very quickly. Others needed time to mix colors, experiment, change their decisions and return to something they had already painted. Some children regularly asked for help; others made it very clear that they wanted to work independently. This was perhaps one of the most valuable things I took away from the day: if we genuinely want to develop creativity, we have to accept that the creative process cannot look the same for everyone.

I had originally planned the workshop for twelve children. The interest turned out to be much greater: we received more than fifty registrations for the first session, and some families came directly to the museum hoping there might still be a chance to join. In the end, I worked with fifteen children that day  already more than originally planned  while other families had to be offered another date.

Of course, receiving more than fifty registrations for a format I am only beginning to develop was a wonderful confirmation that there is genuine interest in this kind of experience. But when I think about that day now, the number that stays with me is not fifty.

It is fifteen.

Fifteen children started with the same circle, worked with the same theme, saw the same inspiration board and listened to the same short story about the Smiley. And by the end, there were fifteen different artworks in front of us.

To me, there is something very precise in this about the nature of creativity. It does not necessarily begin with absolute freedom or a completely blank page. Sometimes it is far more interesting to give everyone the same starting point  and then see how many different paths can emerge from it.

Perhaps our role as adults is not to teach a child how to create the “right” artwork, but to resist giving them the answer for just a little longer  long enough for them to have the space to search for their own.