Stone lithography is an antique process that creates prints with a unique textural quality that is difficult if not impossible to replicate. In the early 70’s when I was first introduced to the process it had recently been rehabilitated. It had met a sudden demise in the early twentieth century when it was replaced by high speed printing presses using flexible zinc or aluminum plates. As if they were the fruits of some archeological exhibition, stones were being retrieved from old city print houses where they had lain untouched for more than fifty years. The presses, often over a hundred years old, were broken-down and reborn. They were too expensive to buy new. The equipment and tools, unchanged since the invention of the process in 1796, were covetously protected. Because it was a process that required arcane substances like gum Arabic and nitric acid and Involved printing with a roller made of leather practitioners who were inducted into its mysteries felt like alchemists who were on the brink of an earth changing discovery. I had a table set aside in the printmaking lab at Carleton College that was all my own. I had a two-hundred-pound slab of limestone there to work on that I would come back to draw on and then transport back and forth to the press on a hydraulic lift. It was a very laborious process, but magic was in the air, and it was a glorious time. I never lost that feeling, and throughout the eighties and early nineties as I worked at my job as the printmaking professor at Indiana University South Bend, I continued to hone my lithographic skills as I worked through several large lithographs. (See Revelations) But the program soon became larger, encompassing many other things including Intaglio, silkscreen, relief printing, wood engraving, typesetting, book arts and papermaking, all with their own magical secrets. The world was changing too. Personal computers came along and then image manipulation software. Ink jet technology was converting the commercial printing world. I embraced the new but kept my taste for the old ways. By 2010 I was designing imagery using Photoshop but executing it in my new favorite medium, etching. The etchings are still executed with needles and brushes. AI has yet to figure out a way to do an etching by just finding the right prompt. The prints are richer in the depth of their ink deposits and allow for a range of drawing skills and techniques that are great for free hand artists but provide some interesting technological bells and whistles. The newest prints are a series of Tarot cards from The Major Arcana. Each card provides a new challenge: The Hanged Man! The Wheel of Fortune! The Devil! It’s all very interesting. I hope to continue to be up to the challenge.