Moira Donegan at Bookforum:
CELESTE DUPUY-SPENCER KEPT ODD HOURS. Before she died in April, Dupuy-Spencer, a prominent painter—commercially successful, critically acclaimed, and about as famous as a contemporary artist gets—was habitually nocturnal. “Even at the best of times,” her father, the novelist Scott Spencer, told me, “she would go into the studio at three or four in the afternoon, and keep painting until six or seven in the morning.” Nina MacLaughlin, a writer who authored a series of essays accompanying the artist’s work in the new book Burning in the Eyes of the Maker: Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, wrote of the endeavor this way: “Celeste Dupuy-Spencer stays awake for days when deep into work on a painting. . . . Forty hours. Sixty hours. Decentered. Hallucinatory.” It was a feat of concentration and physical endurance that evoked religious mystics or marathon runners. A 2021 profile said that Dupuy-Spencer had placed shag rugs around her Los Angeles studio, so that she would fall onto something soft when she finally collapsed.
In the years before Dupuy-Spencer died, those long nights were often difficult. She received threats for months. Since 2023, as the genocide unfolded in Gaza, Dupuy-Spencer had begun to speak publicly and fervently in favor of Palestinian freedom. Her work changed, too. She started making pieces that depicted world leaders as moral grotesques, dwelling on their responsibility for the genocide.
more here.
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