Creative Couples: Love, Art, And A Shared Life In San Miguel - Britt Zaist And Henry Vermillion

By Judith Jenya

In a sunlit house tucked into the rhythms of San Miguel de Allende, art is everywhere. It hangs on the walls, leans against furniture, spills across tables in the form of drawings and half-finished ideas. More than that, it animates the life shared by Britt Zaist and Henry Vermillion—two artists whose love story is inseparable from the creative paths that brought them together and kept them together for more than four decades.

Zaist, born in Jamaica, New York, is unmistakably a New Yorker at heart: direct, organized, candid to the point of comedy. She grew up on Long Island, attended a private girls’ finishing school, married young, and lived a peripatetic life dictated by her first husband’s engineering career. Art, however, was the one constant. “Always doing art,” she says. “Always.”

Her formal training came later, when she enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, studying watercolor with Mario Cooper, president of the American Watercolor Society, and drawing with Gustav Rehberger. The experience shaped her disciplined, gesture-based approach and earned her life membership at the League—a credential she describes with characteristic bluntness: “It indicates you’ve demonstrated some talent to someone.”

Vermillion’s path could not have been more different. A fifth-generation Texan with roots in dirt farming and ranch country, he is entirely self-taught as an artist. Before art claimed him full-time, he earned a master’s degree in social work, taught school, worked as a nonprofit director and lobbyist in North Carolina, sold agricultural equipment to tobacco farmers, and absorbed a lifetime of stories—human, political, psychological—that would later surface in his paintings.

They met in Raleigh, North Carolina, through an artists’ association where Vermillion was president and Zaist volunteered to produce the newsletter. Both were married at the time; both acknowledge the complications without romanticizing them. “Somehow, we got together,” Zaist says simply. “And here we are, 100 years later.”

What makes their partnership work, they insist, is difference. “Total opposites,” Zaist says, without hesitation. She describes herself as a commercial artist—“an art whore,” she jokes— happy to take commissions, particularly pet portraits, and unburdened by emotional attachment to the work. Vermillion, by contrast, is a narrative painter, deeply invested in storytelling. His canvases often begin as sketches on napkins made in bars or restaurants and evolve into layered scenes that invite viewers to invent their own meanings.

Their contrasting approaches mean there is no competition between them, only complementarity. “If you have two artists who are too close in their work, you’ve got trouble,” Zaist says. “We don’t have that.”

In 1991, the couple took a leap that would define their shared life: they moved to San Miguel de Allende. Zaist hated it at first. The pace, the mañana mentality, the lack of New York-style efficiency made the transition painful. Vermillion, more attuned to the culture, settled in easily.

Over time, San Miguel became home to both. A year later, they co-founded Galería Izamal, a cooperative gallery that would operate for nearly three decades. Zaist managed it—by her account, “herding cats”—while Vermillion provided curatorial vision and artistic leadership. The gallery grew from a closet-sized space into a respected fixture near the Teatro Ángela Peralta, showcasing both local and international artists. At the same time, they were both very involved in the animal rescue organization, SPA. The gallery moved to a new location, and when increasing bureaucracy, digital demands, and sheer exhaustion made it untenable, Zaist was ready to let it go. That moment, like many in their marriage, revealed a quiet trust. Each has made sacrifices; each has followed the other at different times. Vermillion left a stable career to pursue art full-time in México. Zaist relinquished control of a gallery she had built when it no longer served her life.

Today, their rented home doubles as a living gallery and informal salon. Friends gather for music, conversation, and art. Vermillion teaches drawing—privately or in small groups— emphasizing fundamentals and serious work. Zaist, semi-retired, accepts select commissions and enjoys the freedom of choice. At nearly 90, Vermillion continues to draw daily, mining memory and observation for stories.

Zaist, who has outlived a family history of early death thanks to open-heart surgery, speaks candidly about aging with gratitude and humor. Together, they embody a partnership built not on similarity, but on respect—for difference, for work, and for the long arc of a shared creative life.

In San Miguel, where artists come and go, Britt Zaist and Henry Vermillion have stayed. Their love, like their art, has proven adaptable, unsentimental, and enduring.

Britt Zaist Whatsapp 415 115 5888

brittzaist@yahoo.com

Henry Vermillion Whatsapp 415 215 1591

henryavermillion@yahoo.com