Janis Goodman is a leeds - based printmaker whose monochrome etchings have become familiar and much-loved by our customers. Having recently completed her successful solo exhibition 'Roofs and Branches' at The Gallery. we caught up with Janis to ask her a few important questions....

1.Describe your studio.

I have the luxury of two studios - in one I do all my design work and draw/ scratch/ enscribe the plate. This is an upstairs back room in a turn of the 20th century red brick terraced house with a big sash window overlooking my garden and the back street. The room I print in is a small in between sort of space, behind the bathroom with a weird roof light that goes up through the loft. It is rather cramped but fine for one person to work in. In some way my whole house is my studio - I use my kitchen to warm plates on my cooker to put on a wax ground, spray enamel paint for aquatints in my garden and store frames and prints everywhere else.

2. What attracted you to printmaking in the first place?

At the back of my mind I knew there was something about printmaking I was drawn to though I had only done a small amount of lino printing at school. When I started an evening class at Leeds College of Art, I immediately felt very much at home with etching - I liked the mixture of technical processes and drawing. I enjoyed the accidental aspects of etching and also the business of making multiples.

3. Are there any artists in particular that have inspired/influenced your work?

Once I started etching I also began looking more carefully at other peoples' prints. People whose work I find inspirational are Anthony Gross, Eric Ravilious, Elizabeth Blackadder, Paula Rego, Eric Bawden, Julian Trevelyan, Norman Ackroyd, Valerie Thornton, Ana Maria Pacheco...I could go easily go on. Probably the person whose prints I stare at most closely - but that maybe because I've got a book containing all his prints is Anthony Gross. Looking at his work makes me want to emulate it, especially his landscapes.

4. Can you describe the physical process of creating a piece of your work - from idea to finished piece.

I am rather tempted to merely recommend that the reader buys a copy of the catalogue for Roofs and Branches, available from "the Gallery" in which I describe it in great detail. A shortened version would be - I start with a design. I often use photographs and quick sketches . I scan these into my computer and reverse them. This ensures that the printed image will be the right way round. I use copper plates which have have the edges filed and the surface checked for scratches that have tbe polished out. I heat the plate to cover it with a fine layer of melted wax. When this has hardened I outline the main lines of my design onto the surface with a felt tipped pen. I then begin to use the etching tool to produce fine lines on the wax. The etching tool is a fine needle encased in wood, which only has to scratch through the wax to the bare metal. Days of work go into this drawing. The needle produce a fine line but I can cross hatch back and forth to produce areas of dark tone. Once I have done all thelines I think are needed, I put the plate in a tank of ferric chloride. The ferric erodes the bare copper where the wax ground has been removed. After about half an hour I take it out, check that the lines are inscribed deeply enough into the plate, wash it and remove the ground. I then print a proof to see what it looks like before I start adding tone with an aquatint. The aquatint gives an effect similar to painting with a watercolour; it is tonal rather than linear. I use enamel spray paint which I attempt to spray in a fine even layer on the surface. The darkness of tone is produced by incrementally stopping out areas of the plate with varnish – from light to dark., putting it back into the ferric inbetween for increasing lengths of time - starting with a few seconds and going up to half an hour. Once I have got the aquatint to the tone I want, I print another proof and look for problem areas where the tone is wrong or the lines may be too light. I then put another hard ground onto the plate and make further adjustments. Ialso may have to burnish out areas which have become too dark as the plate has been left in the ferric for too long. I use a combination of black and Prussian blue etching ink to print my work. The ink has to be forced into the grooves and minute holes which have been made in the surface of the plate.I then wipe it off the surface of the plate so that the unmarked parts of the plate are ink free.I put the plate through an etching press in a sandwich of damp paper and soft wool etching blankets.Think giant mangle here. The pressure forces the damp paper into all the inked grooves where it picks up the image.

5.Do you have a favourite piece from the exhibition?

My favourites are always what I am working on at the moment - however I am

extremely pleased with "Propagation" in which I made a complex perspective work and in which I also managed to suggest distance through the lines of the etching rather than by applying an aquatint. It is an image which could have been ruined by a false line and I managed to avoid that.

6. What advice would you give to anyone wanting to become an artist?

Just to keep on drawing, painting or making - all the theories about persistence and practice feel right to me. I just went on drawing because I liked doing it and I have got better at it because I do a lot of it. I've definitely put in my 10,000 hours.

7. Where are you happiest ?

There is a particularly delightful and rare sensation when a drawing is going well - it is a sort of wonderful concentration and within it I feel this is what I am in the world to do. However in the absence of that I am perfectly contented hanging out with friends and family, walking in the country or visiting Masham!

8. What are you top 5 desert island artworks (your own or other people's)?

These are chosen on the basis that I am confined to a smallish room on my desert island and these are the pictures I want to be surrounded by. In no particular order: John Nash's "Window Plants", Samuel Palmer's "Cornfield by Moonlight", Eric Ravilious's The Greenhouse Cyclamen and Tomatoes, a Gillian Ayres bright carborundum etching such as "At this stage", Anthony Gross's "The Poet's House"- and I'm squeezing in a sixth as a reward for mainly gathering prints. It is Ana Maria Pacheco's "Hairy Legs of the Queen of Sheba"

9.Do you prefer the city or the countryside?

As a non-driver my preferences are always for somewhere within walking distance of a bus-stop. I love being in the country but have always lived in the city and feel more like myself here. ( in Leeds)

10.What's next?

At the macro level I seem to be very absorbed with drawing trees - am working on two new etchings inspired by Hackfall Woods which I hope will be in September's exhibition here. On a larger scale I'd love to be able to sell enough work to allow me to live off my etchings alone. I would also like some collaborative projects such as working with a writer to produce an illustrated book using my etchings.