The Worth of Little Habits

This little habit started 30 years ago

It’s useful to pay attention to the little procedures we find ourselves doing most likely just for pleasure, or out of some immediate need. This applies to everything really, not just our professional lives.

I’ve always walked and even as a child I enjoyed it. The rhythm of it, one step after the other, on and on…..helped me work out problems, helped me get out of my own head and just see, hear, and enjoy all the things around me. It helped slow down the pace of life. Ultimately it allowed me to experience every environment I’ve ever been in, and it’s the reason I’ve painted landscapes for so many of these decades. I walk every day and if for some reason I miss a day, something will seem a bit off and not quite right.

We invent little procedures because we want or need them.

I came to this procedure of doing small drawings, collages, or paintings more than 30 years ago. I started teaching art full time in 1989. The days were long and tiring, the duties many, and I wasn’t used to the degree of organization needed to teach at an important private boarding school. I worried that I would have no time left at all for my own painting. Though the job was exciting and the school beautiful, the thought of losing my painting practice was nothing short of depressing.

Trinity College School, Port Hope, Ontario

But, we invent according to our needs! Whereas in the past I often painted large canvases and works on paper, and worked all night long, I now switched to small scale pieces. I made quick sketches during my lunch hours and spares, and often painted an 8 x 10 inch piece from these on-site diagrams when I got home, usually late in the evening.

Doing even the small paintings regularly, alongside the teaching schedule, was often taxing, but it allowed me to keep my sanity during those teaching decades. And, wonderfully, the procedures invented during those years continue with me today. So there was real merit to them……I value them even more now that I did in my teaching years.

I remember how these small magnet images started. Silly of me in retrospect, but I often used a lot of my holiday time to prepare work and student project media pieces for upcoming sessions. I was just finishing up cutting Masonite for the next student project and noticed there were nice bits left over, so I cut them up into 2.75 x 2.75 inch squares, sanded and primed them, and proceeded to make a series of small paintings. I remember how pleased I was to have a few small paintings to take home from the school studio that day.

Those first pieces were done from invention and source materials in the studio, but the habit of completing those little things stuck, and the majority of them became drawings and paintings made on-site over the years.

Of course these little things are all fridge magnets! Above are 2 shots of my fridge door, and these pieces spread elsewhere in the house as well. You can see that there is also a variety of subjects, methods and approaches. But overall, it’s the plein air pieces made from the front seat of my car that predominate.

I think the real advantage of these little pieces is that they give me the chance to do some productive work without a large investment of time and energy. Larger and longer pieces take more of a lead-up even to begin. I can fit these into all kinds of spots in my day, and there is a real ease in the way they are accomplished.

I talk about this habit here in some detail, because it really highlights that the methods you invent to keep yourself going really are as important as the specifics of making any individual picture. Above all else, you are the inventor of your methods, habits, and procedures. The individual artworks spring from all this.

There are hundreds of these small pieces, mailed all over the world now, and I’m still not tired of making them because they seem to constantly regenerate and re-invent themselves. There are so many things possible within this small format I don’t run out of possibilities.

I include the last image above (it’s not a finished work nor is it meant to be) and I won’t say much about it other than….watch carefully what your disinterested play is all about. The things that you make in your unguarded moments can give you secret insight into what habits or methods you might (or should) create in your work.

And remember that above all, the point really is to keep going. So, what will keep you going with high interest and intensity? The answer is often your invention of small methods/habits that fill some need in you.

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My work is produced daily and all pieces are added to the 2 sites below:

Harry Stooshinoff website

Harry Stooshinoff on Etsy

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