This somewhat involuntary expansiveness of concept must express itself in a rather constricted space, for there is limited common territory which can contain some subset of each of these layers. Thus, my settings are familiar but not architecturally correct locales based on places I have inhabited over a long time, combined and freely distorted into a new place, of the kind we go to in dreams. The reminiscent but not exactly historical events which take place there also exist in many times at once. This is how things get so crowded, despite the lonely or intimate nature of the experiences.
The difficult, delicate, capricious, expensive, poisonous and exhausting medium I've become addicted to enhances the boggling contradictions of my efforts. I take pride in producing images which can be owned in their original and technically richest state by ordinary people; yet in a world with an endless supply of movies, TV and rock music it's hard for most to see the value of a small, still, hard to penetrate black and white image. On the other (yet strangely similar) hand, these objects are probably too modest to generate interest as Bigtime Art Biz.
Nonetheless, lithography seems ideally suited to my dual aims of graphically expressing ideas and providing an elegantly complex visual experience. It has encouraged certain formal tendencies. The surface of the stone invites a rich range of values. Marks can be layered over each other repeatedly, allowing a direct overlay and phasing of multiple rhythms. The flat transparent ink surface enhances the hint of illusion. Color printing allows me to wed the rhythmic concerns of drawing in black with analytic color theory thinking. The bright transparent inks overlay each other and create a broad mix of a limited palette. In these color prints I've been combining drawings on stone and metal plate with the somewhat more recent technique of photomechanical plates, using drawings on mylar as hand-drawn negatives. This allows me to stack the images for the print on a light box and draw marks on different drawings in direct and spontaneous relation to each other.