I started the Long Story paintings in 2004 as an exploration of fractured narratives and visual storytelling inspired in part by the cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs and the writing style of Gertrude Stein.
Comprised of cartoonish oil paintings on five inch wood squares, Long Story has grown to more than seventy images. When finished, the series will have more than 250 individual squares and will be exhibited in no particular sequence.
As Long Story has grown in size, I've begun to think of the individual panels in terms of grammatical structure - nouns, verbs, etc. Some of the squares are deliberately ambient, giving the viewer's eye a place to rest when viewing the entire series.
David Balluff is a New York based artist and designer. His attention to mass media gives him the ability to graft his own narratives onto familiar plot lines and archetypes as a form of playful counter-point to assumed notions of identity, gender, context and memory. He holds an MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
