If you wake up and feel your world is a little jaded, sad or gloomy, then you need a dose of Richard Adams. You must make haste to Burford High Street, where the Brian Sinfield Gallery is exhibiting his work. You have until Saturday, May 6.

Richard's pictures are like dreams, only magical midsummer nights' dreams, definitely not nightmares. They feel to me like the best recollections of childhood summers when the sun always shines and the flowers in the meadow are knee deep. You are in a land of smiles and plenty. It is fairyland. Indeed, there are fairies at the bottom of Richard's garden floating out of wells and through doors. His cheeky sense of humour is in all his paintings. I particularly liked Gardener's Girl in which a laughing girl is pushed in a wheelbarrow with a huge and suggestive savoy cabbage in her lap. The fairies and the wry humour had me wondering if he has any Irish in his ancestry. Richard told me: "Not a scrap, but I do have red hair. The fairies add mystery. Flights of fantasy are happening beneath the surface. Children experience them but adults are inclined not to see them."

He creates idylls but these are not so much visions of arcadia more benign surrealism. Clouds can be cotton wool or flying saucers and pigs can fly. Thatched cottages appear to be dug into the landscape or growing out of it like mushrooms. There are people in his paintings. They are singing milkmaids, swooning lovers, cyclists defying gravity, picnickers in haystacks and a naked woman aboad a tractor.

Richard was born in 1960 in Hampshire. The family moved to Wiltshire where he was brought up amid the south Cotswold countryside. He says the landscape has had a strong influence on his work but none of the places in the pictures are particular locations. "As a child, I played on Marlborough Downs. The Ridgeway has stuck in my memory. I have an idealised version in my imagination."

He received a BA Hons in Graphic Design at Leicester Polytechnic. Making a living as an artist has never been easy. I asked him how he succeeded. He said: "I began by working as an illustrator. I designed for Barclaycard, British Rail and many other companies but I always wanted to be an exhibiting artist. I took the plunge. It was sticky for a while, but I am lucky. People seem to like my pictures. They respond to the sexual innuendo and the magic. I try to keep my ideas fresh and am never complacent." It seems that for Richard his dreams have come true.

Brian Sinfield, who has a finely tuned eye when it comes to art, has obviously been seduced by the magic. "I have always admired his work, partly because of its humour and partly because of its underlying surrealism. Richard is fundamentally an illustrator, but he manages to add another dimension, exemplified by his figures that often float at an angle above the ground, thereby creating an 'oddness' inherently his own."

The prices of his paintings in this exhibition range from £950 to £6,750.