my name is Damien summer I was born and
raised in Durham North Carolina and I'm
an artist in area 919 I go out and take
a lot of reference photos right around
the land where I grew up out out in the
sticks out in North Durham so there's a
lot of old tobacco curing barns kind of
old shacks dilapidated places and
they're actually the same some of the
same places that my bus used to pass to
and from every day on the way to school
we were kind of like the first ones on
the bus and last ones off so spent two
hours bumbling through the landscape I
didn't realize I would have such a
profound effect on me but I keep going
back there and with this with the source
material for Requiem it's it's another
one of these kind of abandoned places
where you don't know whether someone was
there 40 years ago or 40 minutes ago I
think one of my subjects is always time
in the passage of time and I'm
interested in making a brand new
painting look old and have this sense of
age kind of imbue it with this aura of
time through different techniques
subject matter but but just kind of
trying to give it this this sense of age
so I want because I would like viewers
to to take away
an idea that that this is a place that's
important to me important to obviously
someone else this kind of unknown the
these subjects that are in the painting
their these lives that I don't really
know but I'm trying to piece together
and there's there's some kind of beauty
in that not knowing but but also that
this kind of sadness of a piano that's
not being used is broken down instrument
that out of life is going to be kind of
continued with with this work of art
even even after the whole hope piano and
the wood and the keys decay