Drips, Drops and Water Spots: Extended Feature
View examples of Damian Stamer's art
Damian Stamer in his studio.
The panels hanging on the studio walls might look aged with their marks and water spots, almost like an old photograph. But in reality they are a new series of work. The marks are manmade and the water spot splatters, in truth, aren't even water.
“I'm excited about the different effects that I can create with paint,” Damian Stamer, second-year MFA candidate in the Art Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says. “Paper towels, squeegees, different brushes all have different effects that create a depth of space but also pull you back to the surface. I'm still inventing different ways of mark-making and creating space.” The splatters, for instance, are made with oil paint.
Another trait this series shares besides the faux watermarks? Several of them feature water in the form of clouds drifting across the landscape. “Clouds have an aura of depth. They're so far away that you can never really touch them, yet we see them all the time,” Stamer explains. “I'm drawn by the immateriality of clouds. They're amorphous, and they're always shifting. So the idea of capturing them, this almost mist, with something solid like paint is really interesting to me.”
These landscapes also feature something else many in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill community see daily—the North Carolina countryside. Stamer grew up in North Durham County and attended the North Carolina School of the Arts. Last year, he discussed the relationship between his art and his childhood in North Carolina with Endeavors while preparing for his first solo show at Freight + Volume, a gallery in New York. Art magazine Modern Painters also covered Stamer's work before the opening.
His childhood in the South quickly turned into a young adulthood experienced worldwide. Stamer studied in Japan and Germany before he went to Budapest, Hungary for a year with a Fulbright grant to study at the city's Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts and to work at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art. (He also found time to complete his bachelor's degree at Arizona State.) He ended up in New York City, where he made other works.
After living in New York for two and a half years, he applied to Carolina. Stamer receives external funding as a Jacok K. Javits fellow. This allows the artist to continue to keep his focus on his work here at UNC. Coming to graduate school at Carolina is his homecoming, he says.
His travels, however, enabled him to paint his home state as he does. “You can't focus on where you're from unless you've been outside of that sphere, that bubble,” Stamer says. “I think it's important to get outside to look at things objectively with a different lens.”
Changing lenses were not the only transformations Stamer illuminated. He also spoke to the way his work resembles the transformation of water. “The changes in the state of the water to ice to water to vapor—there's a real similarity in the way I'm using paint. It's all paint so it's all the same material, but I can try to change the state and the way it looks by making these marks.”
See the video below for another example of Damian Stamer's work. This collaboration with George Jenne was also shown at Freight + Volume.
♦ Laura Lacy