At a glance, you might say that Alex Uxbridge was just another painterly celebrator of the English (or as it turns out, frequently the Welsh) scene. Nothing wrong with that, of course: many of Britain's finest have belonged to the same broad church. Sometimes the works are simple, direct landscapes, with a lot of emblematic greens and browns. Sometimes they have been faintly grotesque urban scenes, crowded with little figures having perhaps rather melancholy fun, or just standing around. The combination of subject matter suitable for the brush of Peter Prendergast with the sort of scene that L.S. Lowry might respond to is slightly strange, but manageable: the devoted countryman could well see town life in such a light.

I must stress that the oddity is not on the purely artistic level at all. These are unmistakably all the work of the same hand, emanating from the same sensibility. The links between all manifestations of Uxbridge's talent are primarily a matter of mood. Everything seems to be pervaded by a species of melancholy as was the case with works showing a selection of his typical characters at a cocktail party, on a cruise ship, making love under a full moon. They might be expected to look happy, but the series was significantly entitled 'Desolation Row' shown at the Boundary Gallery three years ago.True, they were inspired by Bob Dylan's song of the same name. But then again, what made him choose it? In this show the literary connection is much more elusive: it is to T.S.Eliot's poem Four Quartets.

In the most recent pictures, Uxbridge turns with renewed interest to "pure" landscape. He says that his landscapes used in the past to be filtered through memory, but now he also paints directly from the subject, in the best Impressionist, plein-air tradition. He still chooses, though, places that seem suffused with melancholy, the deserted parts of the Anglesey coast or the disused copper mine, and when there are figures included they generally seem isolated, gazing wanly out to sea. Come to think of it, even in his most "liberated" plein-air pictures, we hardly ever seen an unequivocally sunny day? Meanwhile, his "town" pictures have moved further away from on-the-spot observation, relying now on memory, or even outright invention, as in the imaginary 'Cities of the Night'.

Maybe Uxbridge's back-story throws some light, maybe not. He is one of five children brought up in the Anglesey stately home, Plas Newydd. Settled in London, he went into publishing, and then set up The Poster Shop, which published and distributed Fine Art posters. It was not till he was in his thirties that he enrolled in art school for four years, since which he has devoted himself completely to painting, and lives some of the time in a very remote cottage on the coast of Anglesey, across the fields from the nearest road.

To many it will sound like an idyllic existence, and possibly even to his conscious mind it has been and is. But there are clearly demons to be exorcised. Long may they lodge in his unconscious, provided he is able to let them out in art of such vibrancy and power.