Off the floor, onto the walls

In the few hours before twilight, you can find Dave Lefner driving slowly through Los Angeles' sprawl, peering from the window of his black Ford Explorer, seeking out shadows. Mostly, it's signs that catch his attention: "Liquor!" and "Cigarettes!" and other exclamations written in the twists and turns of neon tubing. The signs are bright and showy in nighttime, but in daylight, rougher edges emerge -- the rust and graffiti of urban decay. Lefner captures it all through his Canon SLR, jotting down the exact time and place of each shot. Dozens of photos and Post-its litter the cab of his SUV.

Scouting and photographing is just the beginning. Lefner then returns to his 2,000-square-foot loft at the Brewery, a massive complex of live-work artist spaces in downtown Los Angeles, and begins the process of linoleum reduction printing, a century-old technique made famous by Picasso that in recent years has been widely abandoned in favor of large-format digital printing. In fact, few artists or printmakers still do linoleum reduction printing, says Richard Duardo, chairman of the Graphic Arts Council at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and himself a master printer.

"We're a dying craft," Duardo says. "Reductive printmaking is a time consuming, tedious process. In this day and age, people don't have that much patience. Artists turn instead to large-format printers, which are glorified Xerox machines. That's why when I see somebody that has mastered this craft, I'm flabbergasted. Lefner has gone beyond being a master printmaker. He's hands down the best linocut printmaker on the West Coast."

The process is mind-numbingly complex, but on a recent afternoon Lefner laughs and chats his way through a printing and makes it look easy.

"I start with a photo of a sign," he explains. "First of all, I look at the shadows." He copies the image by hand onto a piece of paper, then completes a charcoal tracing and flips it over. He rubs the backward image onto a gray slab of linoleum -- yep, the same stuff used as flooring -- and sprays its surface with fixative. He's ready to carve.

Using just two basic knife tools, one with a blade shaped like a V, the other like a U, Lefner slices away the linoleum, discarding pieces into boxes filled with thousands of cuttings. "The first thing I do is incorporate the white of the paper showing through somewhere," he says as he cuts. "I carve those areas away off the block."