In the world of their creations

Everybody can fall ill, but it is very sad when it is a child, when it is a dire necessity to leave the customary children’s world and enter the world of medical institutions and interiors. The child is stressed out because of specific walls, unknown medical objects and surroundings. This unexpected negative situation only causes depression.

The figure of a small flexible-armed girl bends over a drawing. She is stubbornly working, and her black braids swaying in time with the strokes. Something goes wrong: she wipes off the sketch and begins to draw again.

I always try to teach my pupils the main thing – to know how to work and not to be afraid of difficulties. It is clear that, to do something, you must know how to do this, in other words, to pass the path of hard work and learning and release your creative potential in order to achieve the main goal – an artwork that is born as a result of the artist’s self-denying efforts. Many of my pupils agree to take this path as a credo. It is perhaps for this reason that they achieve considerable success in art, win first prizes at international, national, and city-level competitions and exhibits and work with me for many years.

It is hot outside, and vacations have already begun. I am looking at the girl. Why is she not going out to relax, as the others are? She is alone in the studio, and the school year is over. At last she manages to express her opinion. She is glad and asks me permission to come again, more than once, during the vacations. She once wanted to paint over a kitchen board. To do so, she was to wipe it with emery paper. Her little hands are moving sluggishly. I come up to and begin to help her. She pulls up her blouse to feel more comfortable. The next moment I am sharply aware of an unusual color in the bends of her little arms – it looks like green-yellow, and you can see some blurred bruises and bumps. She says these are the marks of injections against a serious and merciless disease. I remembered Taras Shevchenko: when a child, he used to escape from sufferings to the world of his oeuvres. A genius and an ordinary girl. Both of them being children, they felt by intuition that art could heal and fill the spirit of life.

Children paint from the bottom of their hearts. Their hands become used to customary subtle motions that stimulate the functions of the brain’s higher portions. The little Taras Bruienko is carefully drawing dogs. The album’s pages show a lot of dogs – small, big, and multicolored – that run playfully around on the ground. Taras is now also with them. He smiles and quickly adds some touches to colors, “throws” more toys to the little animals with his pencil so that they live together cheerfully, in harmony, without quarrels and problems. Nobody will remain indifferent to the sincere and emotionally-expressed idea of a child’s picture.

By his or her very nature, a child trusts beauty, for it comprises the harmony of kindness, mercy, and elation, which strengthens a personality’s vigor and state of mind. And if beauty is in the pictures of child artists, it will have, as soon as possible, a salutary effect on sick children, for they will communicate with one another in the visual language of childhood.

The bright and colorful pictures created in the universal children’s language of visual art will be the islands of comfort, emotional and salutary influence inside medical institutions. They will suggest that we mingle with child artists and understand their fantasies. They will invite us to a bright world of birds, animals, flowers, and people. They will let you feel confident and stronger in an unknown milieu, make you wish to take a pencil and draw something that is deep in one’s heart, and try to tell others about you. The artist and society form the unbreakable axis of a dialogue.

We have given our studio children’s pictures to the following medical institutions: Regional Children’s Hospital No.2 in Bila Tserkva, the Regional Children’s Hospital in Boiarka, the Children’s Health Center Barvinok in Boiarka, Regional Children’s Hospital No.5 in Kyiv, and children’s out-patient clinics No.1 and No.2 of Kyiv’s Pechersk district. We sincerely hope that our beautiful pictures will support the ailing children and help them be stronger and healthier.

Larysa Izaak is an architect and designer, Meritorious Educationist of Ukraine