Five boys lounge on a rock like a pride of sunbathing lions. They are in early adolescence and dressed in swimming trunks and baseball caps; all gangly long limbs and pigeon-chests. You can almost smell the BO, feel the rising testosterone. One is standing up on the rock with his back to the others. A sixth stands a little way off from the group, his head bowed. He is the outsider; pushed to the edge of the group and isolated by a backdrop of flat grey sky that takes up a good deal of the painting. There seems to be an unspoken hierarchy. There are no other markers to suggest where the place might be. It is as if the rock were the whole world. There is something tribal here, reminiscent of the emotions conjured up in Lord of the Flies.

In another painting, three teenage girls in shorts stand in a clearing on the edge of a pine wood. It is the sort of place where they might be attending a summer camp. The middle girl is showing off to the other two, waving a pair of 'cheerleader' plumes, as if practising her routine.

Grace O'Connor is an American artist, born in 1974, who now lives and works in England. In 1994 she won the Hunting Art prize for young artist of the year. Her work deals with that territory between childhood and adulthood; the moment of emerging knowingness, just before innocence is completely lost. The palette of her meticulous, finely wrought paintings is pale and dreamlike; soft pinks, browns and blues. The places she paints lack specificity. They are idealised locations that speak of open space, freedom and outdoor activity.

A boy in swimming trunks stands on an old stone pier; girls in bathing suits walk through open fields. Two boys prepare to launch a canoe into an empty lake. The images tap into notions of the American sublime and the writings of Thoreau or James Fenimore Cooper. In Europe we tend to forget how important landscape was to early American art " how, for the 19th-century Hudson River School and artists such as Frederic Church and Thomas Cole, the huge vistas and awesome wilderness of the continent defined American identity. Add to that a smidgen of Nabokov and a dash of US coming-of-age movies such as American Graffiti, and you have something of the flavour of O'Connor's work.

These images may be nostalgic recollections of her own adolescence of long summers and intense teenage relationships. But we live in a post- modern, post-Freudian age, where innocence can no longer be viewed as a 'pure' state. We cannot see these groups of suntanned girls without thinking of Lolita, or the young boy on his skateboard without a sense that behind every idyll, there lurks the possibility of something uncanny. In many ways, these paintings are like American versions of George Shaw's disquieting suburban landscapes and playgrounds.

Formally, they are very accomplished, a mixture of flat-worked areas of sky and tightly painted small figures that draw in the eye. They are not ironic, though for all their sincerity they hover on the edge of kitsch. That is especially true of In the Trees, a large painting of blue tits sitting in branches set against a flat blue sky, like the decoration on a Japanese vase.

Prices range from pounds 400 to pounds 4,000 +VAT.

Grace O'Connor: New Work, Paul Stolper, 78 Luke Street, London EC2 (020- 7739 6504) to 18 June

Copyright 2005 Independent Newspapers UK Limited