Beasts in the Landscape

Adrienne Cullom

Like her Atelier 17 predecessors Ian Hugo and Joseph Hecht, Adrienne Cullom uses sharp, delicate line-work to portray creatures in environments that verge on the surreal. Collum enrolled in the Atelier in 1961 on a scholarship from the French government after studying painting in Atlanta, GA, and in Vienna, Austria; engraving quickly became a passion of hers and she continues to work in the medium today.

"Beasts in the Landscape," is a dreamlike, surreal narrative from a series that Cullom was working on that focused on "beasts". The beasts in this composition are creatures from another realm, the worlds of Bruegel or Bosch.

Adrienne Cullom was born in Memphis, Tennessee on May 27, 1938. She studied at the Atlanta Art Institute in Georgia from 1956 to 1959 and, following her graduation, she traveled to Austria where she attended Vienna's Akademie fur Angewandte Kunst for one year. Receiving a scholarship from the French Government, she went to Paris, where she studied at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 from 1961 to 1962.

Cullom met fellow artist Sergio Gonzales-Tornero at Atelier 17 and he followed her to Atlanta. They married, moved to a small railroad-flat apartment in Greenwich Village in New York, and raised a family. In New York, they continued their pursuit of printmaking by working at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in lower Manhattan. In 1968, they moved into a house in Mahopac, New York, acquired from Sergio's publisher in exchange for prints, and set up their print shop.

She is a master of the burin, engraving very intricate plates. Her earliest prints were in black and white but she eventually began to explore the use of color. In the 1970s, Cullom began creating hand-dyed, intricately knotted fiber masks, and currently pursues both printmaking and mask weaving. In 1983, she participated in a summer exhibition at the Rosenfeld Gallery in Philadelphia, the Boston Printmakers National Exhibition, and she had a solo exhibition at the Silvermine Center for the Arts in New Canaan, Connecticut. In 1985, her engraving Contemporaries was offered as an Associate Membership Print by the Society of American Graphic Artists.

Cullom and Gonzales-Tornero had a two person show in 2012 at the Marina Gallery in Cold Spring, New York. She exhibited her knotted fiber masks while he showed his modernist paintings.