John Duffin works mainly in the medium of etching and spends long hours drawing on the copper plates to create light and shade, working from small pencil drawings he has made whilst out walking in the city streets. He works with line and cross hatching only and prints with the blackest ink on the whitest paper he can find. He likes the directness of drawing on a plate; it distills his visions of the urban world and allows him to create very direct images with great subtlety and mood. Etching for him is a long and methodical process, purifying his imaginative impressions of the world onto plate and paper.