Bringing Lyndon Home

When Jessica first came to me, the ask sounded simple. Her uncle had passed, and he had left behind a body of paintings she wanted displayed on the internet as a real exhibit. A few ideas came to mind. But before I wrote a single line of code, I did the thing that mattered most. I sat down with her.

We spent a few hours talking about who her uncle was and what he meant to her. That conversation shaped everything that came after, starting with my first real decision: keep the design minimal and get out of the way. The paintings had to speak for themselves.

Who Lyndon was

His name was Lyndon Johnson, and the way Jessica tells it, he lived a life most people only read about. He was a famous hairstylist in the 1980s who styled the hair of Princess Diana, the Hilton family, royalty from around the world, and a long line of rock stars and musicians. So rather than write his story myself, I had Jessica write it. The about page is hers, in her own words. Nobody was going to capture him better than the person who loved him.

The paintings

Everything on the site is original work from Lyndon's own catalog. He painted for the people around him, friends and family alike. Jessica herself owns around twenty of his pieces. The rest are spread across the family, divided among her sister Rachel, her brother Will, and her nieces and nephews.

At least, that was the assumption. What Jessica has come to realize is that Lyndon made far more paintings than anyone in the family knew about, many of them gifts to friends over the years. Paintings she had never seen. Paintings she never knew existed. So now she spends part of her free time each month combing through eBay listings, Facebook Marketplace, and estate sales, hunting for her uncle's work. The pieces mean that much to her, and as family, she wants to bring them home.

The name problem

Here is where it gets hard, and where the website earns its purpose. Try to search for Lyndon Johnson's art online and you get nothing, because Lyndon Johnson is also the name of a United States president. Every search drowns in LBJ. The man's actual paintings are effectively invisible on the internet.

The website, lyndonjohnsonart.com, exists to fix exactly that. If someone stumbles onto a Lyndon Johnson painting at an estate sale, or finds one tucked inside a larger collection, the hope is they can search his name, land on the site, and reach Jessica to send it home. It is a lighthouse for paintings that have drifted off.

How I built it

The build itself was straightforward. I had Jessica photograph every single painting on her iPhone, frames and all. From there I ran each photo through the AI tools in my own skill library to enhance it and cleanly remove the background. Those became the foreground of the site. Every piece got its own detail page with accurate dimensions and an estimate of when it was painted.

I could have stopped there. It would have been a perfectly good gallery. But I had an idea.

Bringing them to life

I wanted the paintings to feel alive. I wanted anyone in the family to be able to sit with a piece, feel it, and actually see the detail in it, without ever being in the same room as the canvas. So I spent about a day working with AI to bring the flat photos into three dimensions.

I first gave the system the ability to render in 3D, then handed each painting real dimensions and depth. The interesting part is where that depth came from. Using the shadows cast in Jessica's original iPhone photos, the AI reconstructed lifelike 3D models, complete with realistic sides and backings that were never actually photographed but are almost 1:1 compared to the real life paintings.

The result

Jessica was thrilled with how it turned out, and she has since shown it to the whole family. Now they can all take part in remembering their uncle, and for some of them, their dad.

I am grateful I got to be part of this. In the end I helped a family get a small piece of their uncle back. Not the lost paintings, at least not yet. But something close enough to hold onto until the real ones find their way home.