Last semester, in my Intro to Painting class, I’ve asked my professor for a clean canvas. My hockey season was over, all the sudden I had more free time and I just felt like doing some art. 

I put the canvas on the easel, and it stayed there for good couple of days. I needed an idea, something good. Later that week, I remembered that my grandparents were going to be celebrating 60 years of marriage that following summer, and I thought it would be good to paint something for them. 

I did portraits of them for their 50th year anniversary when I was 12. 

This time, I decided to do two paintings, one for each. For my grandma, I did this big caricature-like portrait of her, which she loved, and found very funny but wouldn’t let me post it here, ha ha. 

For my grandpa, I decided to paint this photo that I knew he really loved and was really proud of. Back home in Czech, we meet up as a family for a lunch or just a coffee every Sunday. And every now and then, it leads to going through old photos and reminiscing. 

I remember my grandpa spending more time looking at this photo than the others. It was a photo of me as a kid learning how to drive his homemade tractor, with him and my younger brother on the back of the tractor, on our little farm. 

To me, it was an ordinary photo, one of thousands. 

To him, it was the perfect photo. A tractor he built all by himself years ago, which to us it is a piece of crap sometimes. There is always something wrong with it. But he always manages to fix it. It is his creation that he will never give up on. He will never get a new one, a much better one, that would safe him hours and hours of time just by not repairing it as much like the old one. 

But it’s his and he is very proud of it – as he is of us, his grandchildren and the whole family. He’s proud of passing on his experience and knowledge to the future generation and of the farm that has been providing for us for years.

He sees that photo almost as a “summary” of some of his achievements. 

I don’t think I have ever been this excited for a painting. I’ve covered the whole canvas very quickly. Throughout the whole time painting it, I felt different than usual. I was very excited about it, and I just couldn’t wait to finish it, so I could show it to them. 

The painting had a big success. It made some of us tear up a little bit. Now it’s framed on the wall in the living room, right next to the drawing I did for their 50th anniversary.