Art Systems Wickham is one gallery that has maintained its program of exhibitions, with the current show by Kerrie Coles, which ends tomorrow, a highlight.

Every two years, and for the third time at ASW, she has shown a mix of pastels and oil paintings, bringing us up to date with her enviable travels and the landscapes that have attracted her.

Recent exhibitions have featured the exotic wildlife of an African safari, Scottish mists and the red rocks of the Kimberley.

This year has been different.

For the first time in many years her chosen subjects have perforce been much closer to home, often within walking distance of her home studio or a short drive away to the ocean baths and harbour.

These scenes for a number of works in the present exhibition are based on photographs taken very early in the morning, with the sky tinged pink by the gathering light of dawn.

Red skies are also dominant in a group of works from early this year when the devastating bushfires were so much a frightening part of our consciousness.

Even in Newcastle, ominous smoky haze became an extraordinary part of our daily lives. Two small strong works document the fires near Canberra in dramatic flaring reds and charred black.

Black gives drama and structure to many of the Newcastle paintings, novel for an artist whom we associate more with pale gentle harmonies.

Black is also employed as background to flower studies.

The paintings are generally smaller than usual, often to their advantage, a further sign that the COVID year has shifted this artist's well-honed practice.

There are vertical formats in place of the horizontal landscapes we have come to expect.

Roses are obviously painted from life rather than photographs, as is one of the strongest paintings in the show, a study of a domestic interior. This imparts a crisp immediacy new to an artist whose work has very much depended on the use of documentary photography.

Maybe her next exhibition will continue to focus on still life subjects and interiors, closely observed and finely detailed.

Once again this exhibition is virtually a sell-out. There is obviously an ever-faithful public for the softly impressionistic landscapes from an artist with a long history in our region, dating right back to her first show with the now legendary Anne von Bertouch in 1994.

By coincidence, Dean Beletich was a student of Kerrie Coles at Warners Bay High School a generation ago. His studio exhibition over a single weekend opened on the same day as ASW.

Better known as a photographer, notable for portraits of artists, Beletich has returned to drawing and the power of the line.

I well remember an exhibition shared with Peter Speight's sculptural personages at the long-defunct Gibson Street Gallery in the late 1980s.

Grids of drawings show an uninhibited mark making of delicacy and variety, the results of working blind in his darkroom. It is amazing that this apparently haphazard process has produced such varied and coherent compositions.

It is indeed a strange concept for a visual artist to work entirely from touch and the remembered experience of mark making.

A recent visit to Maitland Regional Art Gallery indicated that this institution has found a new energy. Release from COVID plays a role, but so does the appointment of Gerry Bobsien as its new director after many months of searching.

I was particularly keen to see the elaborate installation by Shan Turner-Carroll, among the first work this innovative artist has made since his return from graduate studies in New York where a highly memorable series of urban photographs showed the pale sun of winter reflected in a mirror.

These photos appear again at Maitland, adjunct to a floor installation where huge boulders have small screens in carved out niches revealing a winter journey. Once again we find a hybrid of photography and performance engaging with elemental forces.

Or does it?

These realistically rugged rocks are in fact lovingly fabricated from man-made materials. I'm glad I caught the tour de force in its final days. Turner-Carroll is certainly one to watch.