THE Pull Of The Print, an exhibition of works by Janis Goodman and Sally Clarke, will be launched with a preview evening on Thursday, December 11, from 7pm to 8pm at The Cafe 68, Gillygate, York.

Janis, from Leeds, has been working professionally as a printmaker for more than 20 years, creating etchings and aquatints that reflect her architectural training and interest in the inner city and familiar parts of the countryside.

“I began by doing an evening class at Leeds College of Art,” she recalls.

“After a while, I had completed every level there was to do and had to leave the classes. At that point, being seriously hooked on the process and given the lack of etching presses available in Leeds for public use, I took the significant step of buying my own press and setting up a studio in my house.

“Three years ago, printmaking stopped being an element of my work and became my full-time occupation.”

Janis’s prints are preoccupied with the repetitive patterns formed by roofs, windows and chimney pots and how they contrast with the organic forms of plants and especially birds.

“I love pattern but I also find great interest in the ways in which the repetition is interrupted,” she says.

“My pictures are small narratives; illustrations in which different elements meet and interact. The choice of subject matter is often visceral; I get a particular feeling that this is the view, the collection of shapes, which feels right and which I want to reassemble.”

Much of Janis’s work concerns places she knows well, views she looks at constantly. “They have become an integral part of my mind’s eye, either where I live in Leeds or places I visit frequently,” she says.

“I enjoy the act of repetition; I can get great pleasure and satisfaction from doing something again and again, but I also like to stop and reconfigure. I’m attracted to the unusual in the midst of the everyday. I try to avoid sentimentality but aim to focus on the quirky and the irregular.”

Sally, from Heworth, worked in various media until she discovered collagraph printmaking 15 years ago.

“For the past three years, I’ve been working with multiple plates, which gives me the scope to use intaglio inking combined with roll-ups and the chance to explore the transparency qualities of the inks,” she says.

You may have taken the chance to visit her studio at York Open Studios.

“I’ve always used the human figure in my work; I can’t imagine otherwise,” she says. “In the posture, expression, situation and location of that figure, I hope to evoke a certain mood, to express atmosphere and emotion. The subjects of my images are taken from lots of different sources but the initial idea often plays a small part in a process that evolves freely.”

The Pull Of The Print will run from December 11’s preview to February 2015 and work will be for sale.