This powerful collection of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s electrifying paintings, paired with lyrical, incisive text by Nina MacLaughlin, captures the current American moment in all its chaos, contradiction, and complexity

‘Taken together, Celeste’s paintings become essay, epic, and hymn…She drops herself into the American mythology and the multiple, fractured, contradictory feelings and beliefs and events that define it. She shows us what’s here.’ – Nina MacLaughlin

With an unflinching eye and a painterly sensibility rooted in both the classical and the contemporary, acclaimed artist Celeste Dupuy-Spencer creates tender yet charged portrayals of American life. Her arresting compositions grapple with memory, identity, politics, and faith through expressive brushwork and deeply personal scenes.

Burning in the Eyes of the Maker is Dupuy-Spencer’s first full-length publication. Spanning a decade of her career, this momentous volume pairs 63 beautifully reproduced paintings, including new and never-before-published artworks, with equally urgent, layered prose by acclaimed author Nina MacLaughlin.

Taking the paintings as a jumping-off point, MacLaughlin creates narrative impressions of the often riotous scenes depicted. She guides readers inside the thoughts of the figures on the canvas, through the histories of the rooms they occupy, and into Celeste’s mind, past, and creative ethos. A plethora of luscious, full-page details bring the intricacies of these canvases to life.

Equal parts visual archive and literary meditation, Burning in the Eyes of the Maker is an emotionally resonant, uncompromising look at our contemporary moment.

Celeste Dupuy Spencer (b. 1979, NYC) is a Los Angeles–based American painter known for expressive, layered figurative works that interrogate power, religion, privilege, and community. A Bard alumna, her work—featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. and major collections—blends intimacy and existential urgency.

Nina MacLaughlin is the award-winning author of Wake Siren: Ovid Resung, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award; the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, a finalist for the New England Book Award; as well as Summer Solstice and the bestselling Winter Solstice, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter, and then as a books columnist for the Boston Globe, and her column on New England Literary News continues in newsletter form. Her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, AGNI, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times Book Review, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.