Rebekah Hunnicutt Doesn't Really Exist

...but she's an incredible painter

Untitled, Rebekah Hunnicutt via Duston Spear © Jon-Marc Seimon (photographer) 2026

I’ve learned, sometimes a little painfully, that my opinion is not necessarily solicited nor desired when Duston is in the midst of a painting frenzy. She’s incredibly disciplined, disappearing into the studio for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, sometimes for weeks, sometime for months. A point is reached, eventually, when I’m allowed to offer an opinion. Or not—sometimes I just look, nod, and walk out. It’s understood that this is my way of not weighing in.

At the beginning of the pandemic Dus started writing her novel, Bird Girl, and pretty soon thereafter, as it started to really take shape, two people moved in with us and the three dogs, namely her protagonists, Rebekah and Prospero. Given that we were in social isolation (deeply so in our case—we were out in the woods and we saw almost no-one for the entire first year) Rebekah was welcome, Prospero too, although a more prickly character. What I loved about them was that as fictional characters who were just starting to find their shape we got to help mould them—and in this, Duston was incredibly inclusive (unlike in her painting). She solicited my opinon, and we spent many hours debating what their motivations and proclivities might be, what magazines they subscribed to, what cars they might have driven…

And then, somewhat abruptly one day, Dus announced that she was going into the studio. The painting studio. She hadn’t been in there for almost a year, given her intense focus on writing. Okay…

So suddenly our pattern was radically different. We’d have breakfast in the morning and Dus would disappear to the studio. I’d keep schtum, wondering what on earth was going on in there but knowing better than to ask, waiting for the white smoke (to borrow a trope from the Vatican). Sure enough, after about six weeks, she casually asked if I wanted to know what she’d been up to in the studio, and I casually expressed a passing interest. Kabuki is alive and well in our relationship apparently.

We walked into the upstairs studio in the barn. It was dark and chilly. Dus turned on the light. I was confronted with six large canvases, all somehow familiar yet totally unfamiliar to me. Apparently she had taken some older paintings and almost completely obscured them under rich, filigreed layerings of mainly red dots. I was floored. Exhilirated. Breathless.

“This is some of your best work,” I blurted out. Duston whirled around almost savagely and said “I didn’t do these.”

What?

“Rebekah did these. These are Rebekah’s paintings. I’ve been writing her for a long time now, and needed to see her work. This is her work!”

Bird Girl was published yesterday, and Duston decided not to put Rebekah’s work on the cover.