Hello friends, here we are in November! It’s amazing to think that there are only two months of 2024 left. This month’s story happened around this time four years ago and is about the power of beauty to bring light in dark times. I hope it encourages you!
Way back at the beginning of 2020, when “pandemic” was only the name of a board game to me, I decided to try making a career of my art (I write more about it here). Very quickly, I encountered the dilemma of what to do with leftover paint after a day’s work. Since I use acrylic paints, once they dry, they basically harden into plastic and I can’t use them anymore. Some artists use a special type of palette that has a cover to keep their paints workable for longer. But because I don’t usually have much paint left over, it didn’t seem worth it to try to keep those bits.
Still, I didn’t like wasting paint.
So I took scraps of paper and got some mini 2-inch canvases and started painting very small scenes to use up my paint. It was great – the paintings were cute and I was starting to amass a growing collection of them. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them, but I kept making them.
Then the world shifted seemingly overnight and we entered a season of sheltering in place, Zoom everything, and trying our best to cope with all the changes and information coming at us. In October that year, I found myself feeling unwell and needing to get tested for Covid. This was well before home testing kits were available so I looked up the nearest clinic to me. After I booked my appointment, I learned that the clinic would be closing due to burned out staff. That clinic had converted into a testing site while the local health authority was setting theirs up and now their staff were too exhausted to continue. I would be one of the last patients there.
Suddenly, I knew what all those tiny paintings were for. I would bring them to the clinic with me and give them to the staff as small gifts of appreciation. These folks needed to know they were appreciated.
When I got home that day, I still had some paintings left over, so I posted them on my social media and asked if anyone wanted to nominate someone to receive one. It could be front-line workers or anyone who was lonely in isolation. In a time when we weren’t allowed to be close to anyone outside our “bubbles,” these would be “art hugs.”
The idea was really well received and I thought that maybe other artists would want to do this too. I posted another batch of tiny paintings and put out an open invitation for others to join. I called it “Little Arts of Kindness” – playing off of random acts of kindness – and I made it into a hashtag so that people could search the term and see who else was participating. I contacted the local newspaper and amazingly, they published a piece about it. (Read more details about the #littleartsofkindness movement here.)
Ultimately, artists from around BC, Alberta, Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia committed to participate and it went as far as Michigan and California in the United States. In a time when we all felt helpless, this was one tangible way for people to reach out and connect – to offer some light.
For me personally, it was satisfying to know that I did something with what I had to make a difference in the world. I sent out probably 20-25 little arts and was commissioned to create a set of another 25 for some teachers. I only heard back directly from one recipient and I saw one other person post about it publicly on Facebook, saying that it really touched them to know that someone out there cared, especially after navigating a harrowing outbreak at their hospital. The rest of them, I can only hope that they were encouraged.
These little arts became the inspiration for my 40th birthday project where I painted 40 small paintings for people who had played a significant role in my life. And eventually, it spun into the 100 Tiny Expanses, which I painted for my first solo exhibition in April 2023.
I still paint tiny pieces with scraps and leftover paint these days. And I still give them out as small reminders to “Keep looking up.” Only it’s less systematic and just whenever I feel like it.
Questions for reflection, if you want to go deeper: Who in your life could use a little encouragement today? What can you do to reach out? What “scraps” in your life (time, materials, resources) could be repurposed to share love in the world?
If you enjoyed this post and want to read a monthly art story, remember to sign up so future posts get delivered to your email! I usually post them the second Friday of each month – this will be changing in January 2025 when I will post on the first day of each month. (Add me to your contacts list or you might need to check your promotions or junk folders if you don’t see the email.)
As always, I love to hear from you! If something in this story resonated with you, if you’re interested in commissioning a painting, or if you have other thoughts, feel free to email, or connect with me.