Talking to Charlie Pryor is like a trip in an air balloon. He is so lucid about his work his commentary floats you over his landscapes until you feel you have joined the dark mysterious woods or the joyous sunshine within. His show at the super- elegant gallery Openspace, makes for an adventure in art and ideas to lift the spirits .

“In any landscape, I see the sky as God's work. It's been the same since the dinosaurs but everything beneath the horizon is derelict human endeavour, with the trees tying the two together. As long as I get the sky right, it doesn't really matter what I paint beneath the horizon as people tend to see what they see regardless of my intentions."

This artist works backwards. He prefers to set up a canvas (he makes the frames himself) prepare his materials and then - go. The result is - a ready -made composition with the practicalities taken care of. And what a cornucopia of work, leaping off the wall with a kinetic magic.

Charlie is conscious of his artistic background - and the achievements of his family . Based in a village outside Cambridge he still appreciates its centrality in the growth of ideas and achievements in medicine. “After all Astrozenica cured Covid, right here .My great uncle was Joseph Lister who brought us antiseptic but there were only 12 people on the planet 200 years ago so he’s probably everyone’s great uncle.”

" Queen Victoria's empire builders took Cambridge science and Oxford religion with them when they painted two thirds of the world pink for her, so in a way we created the world paradigm right here, Darwin, Newton - and because it was all true, it was also right. As one of my clients observed, we've had jam on everything. I couldn't resist that as a title"

Images , histories, stories are all part of Charlie Pryor’s persona. He was first a photographer before a painter and it shows. The command of light and shade in his pictures is extraordinary - and it is hard to place the time of day depicted when you look at them. And you do look at them and look again and see some other dimension . Is it evening in the painting above? Do we care? Charlie’s mind moves throughout the centuries , he finds his Viking heritage in a physiological quirk in his hand and he marvels at the endurance of human effort from bows and arrows to the NHS. He places art and performance within the bracket of human effort in fact at its core.