Portraits of Family House

The Portraits of Family House project is a series of painted oil portraits orchestrated by professional painter and portrait artist Seamus Berkeley, honoring the courageous network of people involved with Family House Inc, San Francisco.

Family House provides free housing for the families of children with a life threatening illness receiving treatment at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. In total, Seamus Berkeley will create 24 oil portraits of the people connected to Family House: the families, children, care givers, organizers, and health care professionals who make Family House the generous, inspiring community that it continues to be. The portraits will create a visual legacy of the faces and spirit of the people who transform Family House into a family’s temporary home away from home. Berkeley will gift the final collection of portraits to Family House to benefit their mission and to enhance the walls of the new Family House location.

Portraits of Family House celebrates people's everyday compassion through portraiture. Seamus conducts lengthy interviews with the people he paints in order to best hear and capture the spirit of their journey in his work. Through this intimate, intensive process, Seamus strives to remain available and open to hearing people's stories, and then shares and celebrates their strength and love through the tedious nature of a personalized portrait painting. It truly is a labor of love. This is the nature of the project: investing time and the gift of being present to those who feel invisible in their struggle, who feel alone in their trauma.

Portraits of Family House stands as witness to the families' turmoil, to the caregivers' endurance, creating a visual legacy of this community of unwavering love and generosity in the face of sickness and death. Portraits of Family House supports them, and honors them through art.