Ruscha kept coming back to the same nine words for over a decade — GAL CHEWS SAME PIECE OF GUM SINCE 1970 — first in paintings made in 2008 and 2014, then in works on paper in 2016 and 2017, and finally in this gravure and aquatint made at Crown Point Press. Lonely Highway sets the phrase on a tilted, sun-bleached billboard standing alone against an empty horizon, its type stencilled in Ruscha's familiar flattened lettering but softened here by the grain and texture the aquatint process allows.

The line itself reads like something overheard on a long drive: half advertisement, half private joke, the kind of found American phrase Ruscha has spent his career noticing and repeating until it takes on a life of its own. Working at Crown Point Press let him translate a phrase he had already tested in oil and lithograph into an intaglio medium for the first time, giving the sign a weathered, hand-worked quality closer to an old road marker than a printed image. It stands as one of the clearest late examples of Ruscha's interest in language as landscape, a single sentence turned into the entire subject of the print.

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