This past month, my family asked me to design a website to showcase my late grandfather’s paintings. Grandpa passed away in ’93, the same year that I was born. We visited him when I was a baby and he held me. There’s a picture of it somewhere… but I never had the chance to really know him. When I was first asked to put his website together, I felt compelled to work on it primarily because I had the most technical experience of anyone in my family in web design. But not long after beginning the project, unexpectedly, it became a personally emotional journey. While working on the site, I enjoyed looking at Grandpa’s art and choosing each spot for his paintings on the site’s gallery. He was quite the painter in his time. Once featured in TIME Magazine in 1950, Grandpa won several prestigious artistic awards, with pieces showcased in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Washington D.C. As I designed his site, I found the time I had with each of his paintings to be a visually moving experience. When viewing his artwork, I could look at it and exist in a moment just as I did laying in his lap 27 years ago as a baby, not really knowing him, but seeing him, if only for a brief moment.

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