Literally “drawing with light,” the luxograph is a photographic print exposed not by the light passing through a film negative, but by a microproccessor-driven laser. Luxography is a photo-printmaking process that borrows elements from lithography and drawing to make a photographic image built with hand-drawn lines.

I begin by shooting photographs with a digital SLR camera. When I’ve chosen my image, I perform color separation from the raw image to four files, each containing the data from the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black channels.

I open each file and blow it up to unreasonably high resolutions so that I can apply a digital version of a printer’s screen, like the dot patterns that newspapers and magazines use to duplicate photographs.

The screens I use are patterns of light to dark and back that form vertical lines with an even gradient between them. When laid over the image, this produces lines that grow fatter or narrower depending on the darkness of the part of the image that it lays over. On this pattern, I use a pen on a digital tablet to draw the direction of the lines. The variations you see in the line patterns come from moments in this stage when my hand was noticeably unsteady.

When the screened images are recombined into a single file, new patterns and color shifts begin to emerge. This final file is fed to a device that uses a laser to expose four-foot wide rolls of photographic paper. This device had formerly been used only for commercial and industrial applications, but is invaluable to my artwork.

I became fascinated with the illusions used in lithography while working in the printing industry. The long hours alone with light tables, films and loupes gave me plenty to investigate, theorize, and experiment. Where color theory had previously left me only mildly interested I now saw fascinating, intricate matrices.

I encourage you to move closer and step away from the work to observe the transformation the pieces make, how different their lives are close up and afar. Get close, defocus your eyes from a distance. See the work dance for you.