When Los Angeles-based high schooler Hugh Saetia was 6 years old, he experienced a loss most people don’t grapple with until they’re much older. His mother died.
Following her passing from gastrointestinal cancer, Saetia’s father hired a nanny named Marilyn McAllister to help care for his two sons, and the woman became a strong maternal presence in the boys’ lives. Tragically, around seven years later, in 2024, one of McAllister’s own sons was killed after his shift as a security guard in 2024.
Saetia as a young child with Marilyn McAllister
Saetia, then 14, yearned to help the woman who meant so much to him but was unsure how he could best support her. “I always loved art. I always loved paintings,” he told Nice News. “So my dad suggested that I maybe just do a painting of them.”
McAllister, who’d also lost her husband years earlier, followed by her youngest son, was deeply touched by the portrait. “There’s no words to express how I feel about it,” she said. “It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful work.”
The portrait Saetia made for McAllister of her son Eddie, who died in 2024, with her granddaughter
Her reaction made a deep impression on her teenage charge, inspiring him to launch his nonprofit, The Eternal Canvas Foundation, which gifts oil paintings of late loved ones to grieving family members. “That moment became kinda like my mission,” said Saetia, now 17.
He began by respectfully approaching mourners at the cemetery where his mom is buried, asking if they’d be interested in a free portrait of their loved one. He paid for supplies — paints, brushes, canvases — with the money he made helping out his dad and brother sharpen knives at a farmers’ market on weekends. Eventually, he started using an internet platform to commission artists across the world, many of whom have experienced loss themselves.
About a year ago, he gathered the funds to register the foundation for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3), and currently, Eternal Canvas has about 400 active requests. Saetia himself completes as many portraits as he can, a process he admitted can sometimes be emotional.
“Grief is something that’s so personal, but it’s universal as well. It’s like everyone experiences it differently, and whenever I’m painting someone else’s lost loved one, I have to remember that this was someone’s life, you know?” he shared. “They had their own world, they had their own story, in a sense. It’s really surreal.”
One story that sticks with him involves a portrait he painted of a woman from Samoa. She’d traveled to the U.S. to care for her adult daughter who was battling cancer, but then developed cancer herself. Not wanting to cause her daughter any stress, she kept her diagnosis to herself until her last month. “Her family just commended her for being so strong and keeping that within,” Saetia recounted.
The rising senior, who’s also a school wrestler, said that the portraits reconnected him to art — a pastime he’d enjoyed as a young child but had prioritized less as his interest in sports grew. “I started to fall back in love with art when I started doing Eternal Canvas. So it was a really full-circle moment when I saw what the power of art could do.”
He’s now working on another portrait for McAllister, this time of her husband and sons. “There’s so many other things that he could be doing,” she said, adding, “And you know it’s coming from his heart. He’s putting all of himself into it. It’s just a great thing.”
A portrait by Saetia of himself and his late mother, who died when he was 6
Those interested in requesting a portrait can do so on The Eternal Canvas Foundation website. You can also make one-time or recurring donations to help Saetia and his team of artists continue creating paintings.
“I think that I’m giving them almost, like, a doorway into this person’s life,” said Saetia of the people who receive the artwork. “This isn’t just a portrait. It is kind of somebody, you know? Somebody that had a presence on Earth and someone that, for the family, continues to live on in their own hearts.”
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