Terry Grimley reviews a diverse trio of exhibitions at the New Art Gallery, Walsall.

David Almond’s play Skellig, currently playing at the Old Rep in a typically smart production by Birmingham Stage Company, contains numerous references to William Blake and his visions of angels.

It just happens that the New Art Gallery, Walsall, by serendipitous chance, is staging an exhibition on that very subject. Blake, famously described by a contemporary as a lunatic whose personal inoffensiveness prevented him being locked up, regularly saw and conversed with angels.

Now celebrated as a peculiarly English visionary (most popularly for the words to Jerusalem, which in the musical setting by Sir Hubert Parry became virtually a second national anthem) and equally revered as a poet and artist, Blake (1757-1827) is an exceptional embodiment of an era of political radicalism and religious individualism.

The exhibition takes the figure of the angel as a starting point to explore his ideas about the relationship of the body and spirit.

Walsall’s Garman-Ryan Collection, housed at the New Art Gallery, includes one drawing by Blake, Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop, which is one of around 135 biblical scenes commissioned by Thomas Butts, a London civil servant, from 1795.

Butts was one of a small group of patrons who sustained Blake’s career, also including the bookseller Richard Edwards, who commissioned the illustrations to Edward Young’s smash-hit “Gothick” poem Night Thoughts (though the illustrations were a commercial flop), and Blake’s fellow artist John Linnell, who commissioned the illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy near the end of Blake’s life.

Blake made no fewer than 120 watercolours for The Divine Comedy, but managed to engrave only seven of them. Six of the watercolours found their way into the collection of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in 1919, including the most famous of the set, The Circle of the Lustful.

That is not included in this exhibition, but there are two other loans from Birmingham, The Recording Angel and The Baffled Devils Fighting.

Seeing them alongside loans from the Tate and the British Museum suggests that the Birmingham watercolours have fared better in terms of fading. The loss of strong colour through exposure to light in many of these works has resulted in an overall effect of pale liquid gold, particularly when the paintings are seen in reproduction.

On the face of it, it’s not difficult to see why the New Art Gallery would be running a Blake exhibition alongside the major current show devoted to the French artist Vidya Gastaldon.

Working across a range of media including painting in gouache and watercolour, animation and fabric sculpture, Gastaldon’s work revives a mystical tradition, with religious, philosophical and ecological references, which frequently recalls the symbolist art of circa 1900 but is clearly not a million miles from Blake country.

The title of the show, Call it what you like..., comes from David Tenniel’s illustration of the Cheshire cat from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland which, in an amended form, is one of the exhibits. A disembodied pumpkin-like grinning head is a motif which links many of the works in the show.

Other characters from popular culture, including the Pink Panther and Sponge Bob Square-Pants, also make a somewhat perplexing appearance.

I was hoping for something rich and mysterious, but expectations are dashed by Gastaldon’s hamfistedness, both as a painter and an animator. The film about nuclear power, for instance, is little more than amateurish. However, some of her sculptures are startlingly different.

Escalator (Rainbow Rain) is a thing of breathtaking and delicate beauty, a screen created by suspending short lengths of coloured wool, arranged in rainbow sequence, from diagonally arranged wires to create an effect of subtle shimmering colour.

Also impressive is Floating Mountain (Mt Hasho) a snow-capped mountain top which might be derived from a Japanese print, recreated as a suspended woollen form. Shambala is a variant on this idea, with 12 small yellow mountain tops suspended in mid-air. It’s difficult to believe these striking works are by the same artist as the lumpy paintings.

On the top floor, The Animals, by Italian photographer Giacomo Brunelli, is a disconcertingly unconventional view of the animal kingdom.

What it highlights is the way that conventional wildlife photography presents a reassuring view of animals as a source of endless grace and beauty, living in harmony with the planet.

In contrast, Brunelli does for animals what the American photographer Diane Arbus did for humans, presenting them sometimes as stressed or even plain dead.

Eschewing the colour which we take for granted in animal photography, Brunelli favours monochrome images of a sooty blackness which make Bill Brandt’s look over-exposed.

Whereas most photographers would show you a horse as the embodiment of grace, he points out how ungainly it is as the weight goes on to its back legs. A demented dog snarls, a goose hisses and a mysterious white bird glides away from us down a dark alley.

It’s a distinctive and distinctly unsettling body of work, but I’m intrigued to see where Brunelli goes from here.

* William Blake: Angels and Imagination until Jan 4; Vidya Gastaldon: Call it what you like... until Nov 23, Giacomo Brunelli: Animals until Nov 30 at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 11am-4pm. Admission free