Our Origin & Mission
About Our Founder
Emily Butcher has been an artist for as long as she can remember. She’s always found beauty in painting human faces, and after personal loss, learned what a comfort it was to have portraits of loved ones nearby once they were gone.
To Emily, paintings are more than the creative expression of a skilled hand – they radiate a unique energy a photo can’t hope to match.
Passion Meets Purpose
In addition to being a skilled painter, Emily has extensive experience as an operating room nurse in a pediatric hospital. This experience provided a unique insight – a number of families had never seen their children free of medical devices. Some families were never able to bring their babies home, or they didn’t live long enough to have a lot of photos taken.
This experience can be incredibly painful for families in the stillborn community, as the few photos they do have are post-mortem. The nature of those photos makes it difficult for parents to feel comfortable sharing them with friends and family. These families are grieving the loss of a real person no one else in the world ever got to meet, and that dynamic can be very isolating while navigating their grief. Emily created Finding Feathers to address this issue and use her artistic ability to bring suffering families a light during a dark time.
How Finding Feathers Helps Those Affected By Loss
The Finding Feathers mission is to provide free 8″ x 10″ hand-painted portraits to bereaved families that honor these babies and children. Emily paints each one herself, and your donation not only allows her to purchase needed supplies, but work directly with grieving parents to make a painful memory a little warmer.
Memorial Gallery
The following portraits not only demonstrate the quality of Emily's paintings, but how she can remove medical devices, tubes, and wires from a family's photos, or combine parts of different ones to produce a heartwarming portrait. While parents of stillborn children are often uncomfortable sharing their photos, Emily's work shows how she can use those images to bring life into their faces, color into their cheeks, and make a painful memory a little warmer for families.
