Michael Bell must have paintings on hundreds of Newcastle walls. He has been well known as teacher and as exhibitor as far back as von Bertouch days 30 years ago. His vision of the dog beach is as quintessentially Newcastle as the much-loved silhouette of Nobbys.

At Curve Gallery until March 25 are 30 small square paintings of new, often darker subjects. Death stalks the dogwalker. Storm clouds gather over The Obelisk. Raucous cockatoos join a more familiar menagerie.

Animals have populated Michael Bell’s works since he first achieved acclaim, designing Mambo posters and tee shirts with his mentor Martin Sharp in the 1980s, when cartoon-style drawing implied social rebellion.

Over the years Michael Bell has consistently demonstrated how expressive of the human condition schematic animal antics can be. There were memorable processions of goats, donkeys and monkeys as bleak as John Brack’s Collins Street crowds. But often animals appear as more individual surrogate humans.

Seemingly impromptu works have appeared in the Archibald and Sulman Prize exhibitions, as well as regularly in the Kilgour Prize at Newcastle Art Gallery.

There have been dozens of exhibitions in Newcastle and Sydney, including eleven at the Ray Hughes Gallery between 1993 and 2014.

The life class at Newcastle Art School has inspired some fine recent works, but Bell’s major paintings have mainly centred on active encounters on Newcastle’s dog beach. Men hurling sticks for dogs to retrieve is fun for both. Cooperation is gratifying, so is social interaction in this series of paintings celebrating a happy place.

The Curve Gallery exhibition enters new territory. Walking the dog is still a rewarding joint activity, though it may be haunted by mortality. Dogs and budgies are both dependent on their humans.

Lambs and lions extend the message, though there is always that magic moment when direct allegory transforms into myth.

Cut-outs, staged projections and props, including a cast of bouncing budgerigars, also expand these small works into evocative new territory. It will be really interesting to see where Michael Bell goes next.

TIMELESS Textiles has a reach well beyond Newcastle, or indeed Australia.

Nicola Henley is an Irish artist exhibiting in the gallery for the third time. Until tomorrow, her textile panels, with their densely dyed and worked-into surfaces, continue to reflect the dramatic seascapes of Galway and County Kerry, with plenty of Atlantic weather and swirling seabirds.

What gives these works their distinctive quality is that the artist is working with increasing freedom from dark to light, bleaching paler areas from a moody blue-black. Sea and sky are becoming more abstract, with the punctuating birds often reduced to the merest suggestion.

Several small pastel studies of similar intensity demonstrate the power of scale, while translating spontaneous small marks on paper into large elaborate compositions on stretched calico.

COOKS Hill Galleries’ first exhibition for the year until March 13 concentrates on the paintings of Phil Stallard.

His inspiration is strongly non-figurative, with colour juxtapositions and brush strokes animating many large canvases.  The largest are in fact the most successful, ideal for large walls in open-plan domestic spaces. Stallard has an interesting background in unexpected areas, with the paintings taking some calculated risks, often anchored by the circle.

DOWN the road at Back to Back Galleries until March 19 is a three-hander of ceramics, slumped glass and the giclee archival prints of paintings by Debra Liel-Brown.

Her complex images consist of detailed landscapes with superimposed silhouettes of figures or trees in an innovative decorative treatment that whets the curiosity to see the original paintings.

The exhibition’s ceramics come from Helen Jackson, whose many and diverse white pieces are vehicles for impressed floral decorations derived from old embroideries, often in sombre blue.  Large free-form slab platters are particularly successful.

Sally Walker (not the flautist) works in kiln-fired glass, utilising its transparent qualities as much as its intensity of hue. Precision is a necessary virtue in complex composite pieces and a hanging peacock-inspired mandala.

Why are there not many more artists experimenting with the possibilities of this fascinating material?