Tiny paintings help feed Hamilton

Last fall, Alicia Looyenga raised $1,050 for the 541 Eatery & Exchange in Hamilton, Ontario, by selling “Little Tiny Paintings.” Five-forty-one is a non-profit, pay-it-forward café with a shared space for paying and non-paying customers. Customers can buy a “button” with their meal that others can then use to pay for their coffee or food. Looyenga painted 50 tiny paintings – one for each day of summer – and auctioned them off with all proceeds going to the eatery. “It is available and accessible to everyone because of their button economy,” says Looyenga. “They were very much on the ground during COVID, serving when so many people needed it.”

This is Looyenga’s second fundraiser for 541; the first came after a year of painting through COVID. Looyenga taught herself to paint when lockdowns started. As a Montessori teacher of Art and French, she was stuck at home. “I was looking for ways to stay sane, to be mindful of good things that continued to happen even during the endless blur of shelter in place. It was a way to remove myself from the bitter frenzy of online commentary.”

For canvases, Looyenga used cut-offs from her husband’s carpentry projects (“I was inspired by a woman who made little tiny paintings every day on tea bags,” Looyenga laughed, “but I didn’t want to dry out tea bags!”). She paints “the beautiful mundane: my favourite yogurt, bananas from No Frills. Also, the snow, the blossoms, the birds, the leaves that come in their seasons.”

Adding it up

Looyenga wasn’t sure if her interest would hold past the first few weeks of lockdown. But as she started to share her paintings on Instagram she began noticing that it was giving her a mental escape from “the world’s woes” while also giving her a way to connect. As she continued painting day after day, Looyenga says, “I started to wonder about how I could use this practice, if I was able to keep it up for the entire year, as a way to be a small part of a solution for problems caused by COVID, especially for those most vulnerable. I found I got less heated about other people’s differing opinions as I worked toward doing something constructive.”

In 2021, she sold all 365 paintings – an entire year’s worth – in her first fundraiser for 541 Eatery & Exchange. The paintings raised $8,500 for the non-profit: “mostly anybody could spare $30 for a little piece of art, and collectively it really amounted to something significant, which is another part of it, you know. All this division, it seems so overwhelming, but it’s kind of neat to see how all these tiny things put together ended up being fairly significant.”

Shared stories

Today, Looyenga says, “the need at 541 is as much as ever since COVID, that hasn’t relented at all, it’s only gotten worse with inflation.” And so, she did it again. “I love how everyone who purchased a painting had a story as to why they chose the piece they did. There have been so many shared stories about aging parents, departed pets, favourite groceries, and so many other unexpected, random connections.”

Sure enough, as I scroll through Looyenga’s Facebook, I find a comment under “Sunshine in a jar,” a painting of canned peaches: “I love this! Twenty-eight years ago my mom-in -law taught me to can and I still do it, even though it is a ton of work. Peaches are the best. So lovely in winter.”

“I didn’t set out to make a change in the world, or anything like that,” Looyenga says. “It just sort of developed from doing a little bit every day. It’s amazing to see what God does through just the tiny efforts.