Painting Gratitude Through Terminal Illness

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Delving into this incredibly heartbreaking story reminds us that the act of creation is about connection at its deepest level.

I was reminded of this powerful truth today while reading a San Francisco Chronicle profile by Erin Allday about Marin County artist Vincent Serritella, whose world altered in a single afternoon.

In Vincent Serritella’s The Human Infrastructure Portraits, you can see and feel the raw immediacy of the artist’s brushstrokes—painted live, on vintage paper, with a profound sense of gratitude beaming through every face.

It is an extraordinary testament to what happens when art stripped of all pretension meets pure human connection. His portrait project is about witnessing and honoring the people who anchor our lives.

Late last year, Vincent woke up to flashing lights and a sudden loss of peripheral vision, only for an immediate medical evaluation to reveal a tumor pressing against his optic nerve.

Just days later, he was on an operating table undergoing major surgery for glioblastoma, a notoriously aggressive and terminal form of brain cancer.

While the medical details are staggering, it was Vincent’s internal response to this crisis that completely made me verklempt (the Yiddish word for choked up). In the article, he recalls the unexpected clarity of the moment he received the diagnosis in the emergency room:

“I’ve never felt so present than that moment.”

He describes a sudden, radical narrowing of perspective:

“And then everything disappeared that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered, suddenly, were the people I cared about and the people I loved.”

Post operation, an entire network of human support emerged—friends, neighbors, and medical professionals stepped in to help carry and process his new life—tending to chores, taking him on walks, driving him to appointments, and just turning up.

Vincent returned to his studio with a singular mission: to paint 41 portraits of the specific individuals holding him up. As he told the Chronicle:

“I’m just so incredibly moved and touched by how much care and how many people have gone into my recovery.”

For an artist whose career includes work for the de Young Museum, this project marked a profound psychological shift. Vincent admits that before his diagnosis, his creative process was often entangled with the heavy anxieties of the professional art world—worrying about market relevance, gallery representation, and the opinions of museum curators.

The illness stripped all of that pressure away, leaving him in the exact same place so many of us begin: feeling a call to create:

“But I truly, truly, for the first time, just threw all that aside. I just wanted to make.”

Because his vision was still recovering during the early sessions, he found himself painting less from precise visual accuracy and more from his internal memory of the person sitting across from him—capturing their essence and spirit rather than just a technical likeness.

(I don’t know about you, but imagining this brings tears to my eyes.)

Today, these quick, expressive, deeply intimate studies line his studio walls in neat rows. It is a striking visual collective: his wife, his mother, the neighbor who hauls his trash cans to the curb, and the neurosurgeon who operated on his brain. (If you haven’t yet, look at the portraits from his The Human Infrastructure Portraits.)

Near the conclusion of the piece, Vincent looks at the faces surrounding him in his studio and observes:

“I feel like all of these paintings are my portrait.”

When we create simply to honor the love in our lives, our work stops being a reflection of our skill and becomes a reflection of our deepest humanity.

Would love to hear your thoughts? reactions? connections?