Smart Art: Going Back To The Days of Doodling

Remember those elementary school days when our minds would wander and we'd fill the corners of our pages with curious doodles? Going into our university years, lectures grew more boring than classes and our doodles grew to cover pages upon pages. Ah, those were the days; now everything is done digitally and our imaginations aren't being challenged like they used to be. We hate to sound like old farts here, but today's youngsters are really missing out on the creative freedom of taking a pen to a paper and letting their imaginations wander. In a campaign to save the creativity of the children - and the sanity of their parents - Smart Art was established as a creative arts space that offers art courses for children and adults, as well as some parent-child classes.

Eman Abdelbakey and Rokaya El Garem; the two met in high school, but it wasn’t until last year that they partnered up to start Smart Art. “I had gone back and forth over whether or not I should do it until last year when I finally decided to go for it, then I found the perfect partner and she helped me to get started,” Abdelbakey says of her partnership with El Garem.

Accounting major Abdelbakey always knew she wanted to be an art entrepreneur, but it wasn’t until her college years that she started to form an idea of what she wanted to do. “The concept itself was formulated when I was in college,” she explained. “I always pictured my business as an arts education centre - emphasis on the education part. I want to have a place where people learn about art from all perspectives,” she added. 

All jokes aside, art is a universal outlet of emotional and creative expression; it can be cathartic and freeing while still posing a challenge. Yes, that includes doodling. You can see for yourselves as Smart Art will be having two open workshops: Zen Art (The Art of Doodling) on January 26^th, and Paint like the Masters (Van Gogh Edition) on January 31^st.

We were big on the idea of adult colouring books, but apparently we're embarrassing ourselves and need to throw them out immediately. “I'm not really a fan of that trend, I'd rather people create their own art themselves,” Abdelbakey said, reservedly.

Find out more about Smart Art on Facebook.