At a certain point, in recent years, I was at a crossroads: stop painting, or find another way to understand what painting actually is—what it can actually do. I decided to turn fully toward painting and away from Art.

The art world likes to talk about power—resistance, critique, progress—but it is an economy first, a social sorting mechanism second, and only sometimes a meaning-making structure. I didn’t understand at first that my paintings would be structurally inseparable from that world. Whatever I thought they could be collapsed under the weight of transaction. They became possessions circulating inside an unregulated market. I learned that attention without ethics is extraction, and that the art world can reward extraction while calling it insight.

The first works from this shift were religious and mythological paintings. These figures are already cemented in the mind’s eye of the world. The paintings were not attempts at critique or impersonation; they were genuine attempts to reach out, or up. Myth survives because it describes something structurally true about being alive. It is what certain kinds of truth look like once they’ve passed through the human brain.

In the studio, painting became the primary site of meaning. I stopped moving toward an image. There was no final picture waiting to be achieved. A mark was made. The painting answered, and I answered back. The work proceeded as a conversation rather than a construction. Painting became a functional technology guiding me toward a depth otherwise inaccessible—not toward personality or intention, but toward something older and quieter.

The figures that arrive do not behave like symbols. They interrupt. They demand translation. I do not command them or aestheticize them. I listen, or I fail to listen and pay for it. That is the relationship.

Painting, for me, is participation in the aliveness of life. It is communication as recognition, not explanation. Meaning emerges only through encounter—when a viewer and a painting agree to stand in the same place and face the same uncertainty. The task is contact.

- Celeste Dupuy-Spencer