THE weird and wonderful, the imagined and the exaggerated make up The Mind Eye's, the vivid new exhibition at Lotte Inch Gallery, Bootham, York.

On show until June 17 are prints and original paintings by Welsh artist, illustrator and designer Clive Hicks-Jenkins and new paintings by York painter Sarah Raphael-Balme.

"Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Sarah Raphael-Balme first came across each other’s work on Instagram," says Lotte. "Fast forward 18 months and their creative offerings are finally united for the first time in the flesh at Lotte Inch Gallery, where the pair’s work creates a visual feast of the imagined, the make-believe and the undeniably quirky."

Born in Newport in 1951, Hicks-Jenkins worked for 25 years as a choreographer and theatre director before concentrating full time on painting. His work has been acquired by all the principal public collections in Wales and his artist’s books, including the first illustrated edition of Peter Shaffer’s Equus, are in libraries worldwide.

"His most recent, creative and wonderfully individual projects have seen him collaborating with The Penfold Press, St Jude’s and Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden, among others," says Lotte.

Hicks-Jenkins shows regularly with Martin Tinney Gallery in Cardiff and Tegfryn Gallery in Anglesey and has had solo exhibitions at Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Brecknock Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Wales and Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford. A major retrospective of his work was held at the National Library of Wales in 2011, the same year that the book Clive Hicks-Jenkins was published by Lund Humphries.

York Press:

Heads, by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Hicks-Jenkins has won the Gulbenkian Welsh Art Prize and a Creative Wales Award; he is a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy, the Welsh Group and 56 Group Wales, and he became an Honorary Fellow of Aberystwyth University in 2004. Actor and art enthusiast Simon Callow called him "one of the most individual and complete artists of our time".

Raphael-Balme studied at Chelsea School of Art, "but it is her most recent and prolific output that has rapidly seen her gain a huge, new, international following," says Lotte.

"Sarah has exhibited in many solo and mixed shows and is a welcome addition to the York Open Studios scene, first exhibiting, with great acclaim, in 2016, and again this spring. With exhibitions in London and New York and collectors across an international spectrum, she now divides her time between York and London."

Away from painting, in her "other life", Raphael-Balme is a cartoonist. The focus in The Mind's Eye, however, is on her "dream-like images that play with colour, shape and pattern and toy with our comfortable understanding of perspective, resulting in visually rich, always emotive canvases," says Lotte.

"Frequently involving figures, plants, objects and animals, her work also includes bold still lives that reveal quirky, surprise objects: Moroccan teapots and vases, unusual antiques and everyday china. Sometimes funny, sometimes bleak, her motifs are drawn from folk art and colour is all important."

The gallery's opening hours are Monday, 10am to 5pm; Wednesday to Saturday, 10am to 5.30pm, and at other times by appointment on 01904 848660.