“To create that structure, to do those colours, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of colour.”Damien Hirst cited in Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, ‘On the Way to Work’ (Faber and Faber, 2001), 119

From the author: “ ...As a child I was a difficult teenager, and often came to class sleepy or under the influence of various substances. My St. Petersburg school’s classrooms were hung with a lot of reproductions of paintings - Madonna, “Fashist proletel”(Fascist flew past) by Plastov, Portraits of the Great Russian People. i didn’t like them, it was much more interesting under my eyelids... out there i reworked them sometimes, as illustrations in textbooks. The Soviet Union was very poor in terms of color, and I always wanted to paint it or even to fully paint it as well as these pictures, whiteboard, classroom, desks, textbooks... Pour out them the color and the space, freed from intrusive images toward abstraction and more global structures than academic cliches or ponderous speeches of soviet teachers.

Completely redone Soviet reproductions and kiots are designed to symbolize overcoming injuries and defects of the Soviet education through processing of images imposed by this system. The mood of formed compositions prompts itself titles in according with the intensity and specificity of the impact of those or other drugs: LSD-25, Heroin series, Ecstatic Katya, Cocaine, Night with Natasha... Consumers noticed that contemplation of "Pictures of Happiness" makes a soothing, sedative effect on viewer while relieves the craving and withdrawal symptoms of the addicts...

In 2013 on the International Day of Happiness (according to the UN - March 20) and his own birthday the artist Kirill Shamanov first presented the installation “Pictures of Happiness” in the Zverevskiy Art Center in Moscow.