When I Paint My Masterpiece

November 18, 2025

What’s a “masterpiece,” anyway?

Turns out that it’s not “a piece created by a master” as you might expect, but rather a piece that qualifies you to call yourself a master; a piece recognized by other masters as demonstrating your mastery of craft. Once you’ve painted your masterpiece, you’re ready to win commissions and teach students.

That’s just one of the things I learned in the Faigin Still-Life Atelier during the 2020-2021 academic year at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle.

Just about everything else I learned during my atelier year you’ll find on my new microsite, My Atelier Year, an update of an earlier free WordPress site with a new landing page and without advertisements.

I’m now using my own database-driven website built with Python and Flask using AI coding tools. It took me a day or so to get everything lined up the way I wanted it, including reusable templates, standard deployment scripts, and a library of components I can mix and match. My next microsite may take just a few hours. And the one after that (with a bit more work on tooling) may take only as long as it takes to describe exactly what I want.

And what I want is to embed Python programs into my web pages.

Studio Tour I’ve been generating code that runs locally on my own machine, using wrappers on powerful existing Python libraries to develop focused, interactive training tools to help me remember things I've learned in the past.

For example, here’s a screenshot from program I wrote for practicing Latin declensions, a skill last practiced in 2003 as a student at Harvard Extension School working towards the Magistri in Artibus Liberalibus (ALM) degree:

Article content EXERCITATIO LATINA: Identify parts-of-speech, declensions, tenses from any sentence in a given corpus And here’s another program that provides training for how to identify trends in financial statements, a somewhat rusty skill first acquired as a student of the Master of Business Administration program at Vanderbilt University - Owen Graduate School of Management, Class of '98.

Article content EXERCITATIO PECUNIAE: Financial Analysis Fluency Trainer evaluates your observations using keyword matching with LLM review Right now, these training tools only work on my machine. But the same infrastructure that lets me build and deploy microsites in hours will let me embed interactive applications directly into web pages. You’ll be able to practice Latin declensions or financial statement analysis in your browser without installing anything.

That's the vision, anyway. Getting there means solving problems I don't have to think about when code only runs on my own machine: sanitizing user input, preventing someone from getting a command prompt if the program crashes, guarding against injection attacks, rate limiting to prevent abuse. Running code in a browser or on a server that anyone can access is a different security model than running code locally. But those are solved problems—I just need to learn the patterns and apply them.

It’s a masterpiece in the making.

Gary Faigin, co-founder of Gage Academy of Art, passed away in September 2025.

Nulla dies sine linea