IF YOU like your artwork to come with a bit of zing, then it will be worth getting yourself down to City Screen pronto.

Until August 19, the Coney Street picturehouse is running a retrospective of the work of the late York artist Ray Fearn. And what work it is. Painted in bold oils and acrylics, the colours leap out at you.

One whole wall of the City Screen's coffee house is taken up with Ray's work.

The display is dominated by a huge oil painting in the centre. Entitled simply Totem, it depicts what looks like a stone-flagged spring, with a totemic structure of rock and stone rising above it, outlined against a blood-red sky. It's shamanistic, primitive, and yet powerfully potent.

Arranged near to it, and also dominating the exhibition, is a work depicting Tamil dancers. Their skins are blued, their headdresses ornate, and the painting seems to pulse with energy.

Others are more low key, yet oddly arresting when you look closely. There's a wonderfully vivid portrait of a loop of the River Wye crowned with trees at Symonds Yat in Gloucestershire; and, from closer to home, an acrylic of a sheep up in the Yorkshire Dales. It's a piece that, as Ray's widow Julie says, shows off his impish sense of humour.

The sheep is looking directly out at you with an expression of startled reproach, the way only a sheep can manage. Above its head is a knoll crowned with trees. It's only when you look really closely that you notice the real reason for the sheep's startled expression: an aeroplane almost hidden against a pattern of clouds in the sky. The title gives the game away: Dales Idyll (sheep startled by A10 tankbuster).

Ray, who did much of his work standing at his easel in the upstairs studio of his home in Clifton, sadly died of oesophageal cancer in 2014, aged just 63.

But he left a wonderfully legacy of work, and there's a Greta selection it it on show - both originals and prints - at City Screen.

Twenty per cent of the proceeds from any sales will go to St Leonard's Hospice, where Ray was a patient.