AI saved my grandfather’s art legacy

My grandfather was a prolific painter for more than 60 years. Our family still has several of his paintings, but many more were given away or sold over the decades. When he passed away in 1994, the internet was still in its infancy. None of his work existed online, and there was no central place where people could discover or appreciate his art. My grandfather painted almost every day for more than sixty years. The idea that his work might slowly disappear over time always bothered me. For years I had the idea of creating an online gallery to memorialize his work, but building a custom website always seemed prohibitively expensive. I looked at platforms like Squarespace, but they didn’t provide the flexibility needed to properly showcase his paintings.

When I started experimenting with AI tools, I realized something surprising: I could actually build the site myself. I digitized the paintings our family owns and used AI to help organize the collection and draft gallery-style descriptions for each piece. With tools like ChatGPT, Lovable, and Cursor, I was able to design and build the entire site. The result is a dedicated online gallery where my grandfather’s work can finally be seen and appreciated.

The most unexpected result was what happened next. After the site launched, people who owned some of my grandfather’s paintings began reaching out. They had discovered the site and realized they had pieces from the same artist. Because of that, the collection is growing again. Paintings that were scattered for decades are slowly being rediscovered and documented.

Here is the initial prompt I used in Lovable:

Prompt: "I want to create an online art gallery for my grandfather's paintings which are all digitalized. It has to work seamlessly between desktop and mobile devices, which a bias for mobile devices."

I used ChatGPT to create the painting descriptions. Here is the prompt I used after attaching an image of each painting:

Prompt: "You are an art critic writing descriptions of paintings for display in an art gallery. For each painting, write 60-120 words describing the paintings with a generally positive critique. Here is what we know about the painting: [list out everything our family knows about each painting]."