For the last six Saturdays I have thrown open my studio doors to seven kids between the ages of 5 and 7, ostensibly to offer some art classes, but really, this was for me. I had been feeling a little stuck, with lots of false starts and second-guessing in my artwork. It was a sign to shelve the ‘work’ for a while and go play outside (my comfort zone) with kids.

There is nothing easy about mixing wildly enthusiastic kids with acrylic paint and ink, Sharpies, white glue, pointy scissors and a wide range of making materials. But through trial and error, this messy, slightly chaotic exploratory play leads to some beautiful surprises.

Kids at this age are not hung up on outcomes yet; they are intrinsically curious about whatever materials they come across. Their gift is showing me where their untamed hearts take them, without wrecking the joint. 

I’ve always loved making but as a school kid I felt great anxiety about producing the class assignment correctly. I was constantly comparing my effort with the next kid’s and everyone could identify who were the “good” artists and who were the hopeless cases, with the main message being messy = bad). So I decided that my class would not be about making any things in particular but just playing around with materials and methods.

I started by giving each kid a coil-bound sketchbook that would live in the studio for the entire six weeks. This is where all the weekly experiments would go, but it would also be a place for them to glue in any flat things they collected that week from their world — photos, leaves, magazine clippings, bits of fabric, birthday cards.

The sketchbook “stuffing” quickly became the warm-up to art-making, as kids ran into the studio to retrieve their sketchbook from the shelf, showing one another their latest finds, and looking over their past pages. 

As they stuffed they discovered new ways to arrange the pieces, which often led to new ideas. For example, one page of glued coins and leaves became a story about a money tree. Another kid learned how to do pencil rubbings on the reverse side of his page of found objects.

But a 9×12-inch page can be a little limiting, so I showed them how their larger experiments could be folded up like a map and glued into their sketchbooks. Going through their own sketchbooks became an activity of unfolding and folding, which also gave them a chance to review their weekly experiments.

I remember being frustrated over the limitations of gritty, porridge-like tempera paints, unyielding plastic paint brushes and shabby newsprint so I put out a bucket stuffed with quality brushes of all sizes and a selection of brilliant, heavy-body acrylic paints. I set them up with their own Styrofoam palettes, a large sheet of white paper masked out right on the wall and made the intentionally vague suggestion that they paint what is inside them. That led to some surprising abstracts, and yes, it did include one portrait of poo. But it was poo with great intention, plus the kid who did that ended up captivated by his palette of swirling colours so the next Saturday he cut it out and glued it into his sketchbook.

Then there was the fun-with-yarn day. One kid demo’d his new pom-pom-making gizmo while other kids glued down bits of yarn like spaghetti and embossed it with a sheet of tinfoil. As they talked and watched one another create, some of those three-dimensional designs morphed into mazes and maps, with the help of Sharpies.

​At right: A bit of yarn, some glue and a sheet of tinfoil transported this young artist into a world of tornadoes and skateboards (or was that snowboards?).

Above: A loose suggestion to create a mosaic from magazines, perhaps sorting by colour or shape was advanced to use found patterns as a dress on a picture of a girl, (left) and a mosaic of heads, appropriately entitled, “Hideous Heads.”

Letting the kids loose on a wide range of mark-making tools pushed their ability to express themselves. “I love this black” was Mimi’s first response as she took the velvety oil pastels for a spin, while the watercolour pencil crayons allowed Javi to achieve some finer painting details.

Every week we talked about the word, ‘inspired’, as in, I am inspired by your great works.